The Machine in the Middle (2017) is a chat application that allows a user to have a conversation with someone else while a very insistent machine in the middle mediates that conversation, trying to fill in the gaps that simple text can’t express. It will analyze the user’s facial expressions to determine emotions. It will also try to determine their gender, age and ethnicity and then look online for visual representations of what it determines.

The Machine in the Middle (2017) is an augmented chat conversation containing extra information no one really needs. The flaws of human communication get mixed in with the flaws of the algorithms we use to communicate. The result is an absurd mediated experience.