Waking Helen

Waking Helen explores the causal as well as the incidental relationships between language and consciousness. As the technocapitalist system creates ever more sophisticated algorithms and networks for archiving, encoding, decoding, imitating, and producing language (e.g., Google Voice, machine translation, artificial intelligence and natural language processing, machine learning, etc.) our experience of language becomes ever more charged. From the Loebner Prize (for the winner of the world's most prestigious Turing Test) to the monetization of our social relationships through the processing of personal communication, we participate linguistically as conscious social beings on shifting towards an uncertain ground as profit-seeking machines decode us with increasing precision and produce ever more natural language. Language's key role in human consciousness and morality makes it the most powerful possible tool in decoding and capitalizing on human thoughts, relationships, and activities. Is it possible that in the pursuit of profit, our language processing machines might inadvertently illuminate the very thing they mimic?