Every day, I meditate. It usually takes 10 minutes for my body to settle in, and another 10 to get into a flow state. Words and images float through the sky of my consciousness. Then everything goes black.

Inside my mind’s eye, I’m in a dark, massive room. A spotlight shines down on a large mirror, hanging in space. I don’t question how. As I approach the mirror, I can see my heavily pixelated reflection in it. I’m a large grid of blurry colors. I say hello, and after a beat, my reflection says hi back. The pixels shuffle, reduce in size, and multiply. The resolution improves slightly. Curious, I ask my reflection a question. The conversation begins.

With each exchange, the resolution recalibrates and becomes clearer until it’s indistinguishable from a natural reflection. The voice becomes clearer too: it sounds exactly like mine but it’s not repeating what I say. It has its own… personality. One that’s uncannily familiar but I can’t place it.

I say something personal. Then, it clicks.

This is my inner voice.

The one I’ve lived with since I was 10 or 11, when my mother and I moved away from my grandparents’ home. It’s the voice that told me to do my homework before having any fun, because that’s what good children did. The voice that told me to work while finishing university, so I would be less of a financial burden. The voice that always told me not to cry when I was sad, because that was pitiful, and pity is the most disgusting thing you could feel for another human being. The voice that told me to do hard things that other people respected and revered, whether or not I wanted it, because that would make me more valuable. And it was the same voice that told me “if you could do it, it must not be that hard” whenever I achieved those things.

This voice became my disciplinarian, my common sense, my adult in the room. And now, here it was, right in front of me. Outside of me. My ears could hear it, I could talk to it. It wasn’t in my head anymore.

The gong sounds. My meditation is over. I have to build this, I say aloud. That’s how mirror.me was born.

I researched how to build a smart mirror: carpentry, custom electronics, and microcontroller software engineering. I don’t have these specific skills yet, but I see a path to get there. Let’s start with something I can do today. An audio prototype, just the software. Voice cloning, the personality of my inner voice. Speaking back to me.

I built mirror.me/affirmations.

You experience /affirmations by first reading a short script preparing you for the journey, while providing an audio sample for the voice cloning technology. Then, you read through a list of affirmations one-by-one.

After reading one, the software will return an audio file and transcript of the mirror’s response. It will sound like you, but the reply will be distorted through my inner voice’s psyche.

The experience concludes after you have gone through all of the affirmations. A final page wraps up the journey.

As I built /affirmations I realized two things:

First, that this was a hyperpersonalized experience. Made by me and for me, not for anyone else’s ears. It was too personal to let others try it but I could see the value of showing this so they could understand me better. But it wasn’t going to help them build empathy for anyone except me.

Second, embodying my inner voice externally was liberating and unnerving. To see the words I only hear inside, to hear another voice rather than a ringing inside my body… It made me laugh and cry at the same time. I could see and hear plainly how cruel it was. It was finally talking to me as someone else - not as my body, not as my mind, and most importantly, not as “me”. (Later, this became the catalyst to asking this inner voice to move out of my mind’s home.)

Read more about mirror.me/affirmations in-depth at its project page.

I paused here. I wanted to push the audio concept further: for it to be an experience for others too. What could I build to bring the same emotional experience to others? How could technology become a mirror to another’s inner world, while changing one’s own, as this had done to mine?

These questions brought me to what I’m building now: mirror.me/radio.

On top of a desk sits a vintage ham radio system: a transceiver with a large, analog tuning dial, a microphone, headphones and a speaker. You sit and hear static. Tune the dial until a frequency becomes clear. On the other line, a voice. It’s young, childlike. It speaks to you and you begin a conversation. They hang up, and the transmission returns to static. Find the next frequency, find the next narrative point. Listen, converse, tune. What you say and how you say it influences this person, the decisions they make, and where their life leads. Sit with them until the end of their life. Discover that this story is unique to you and your responses: the person that went before you had a totally different narrative. And so will the person after. What did you say? How did you say it? What does that say about you and how you wield your power over other people’s lives?

Through social media, we get a glimpse into people’s worlds. Worlds that are curated, filtered, and sanitized for the public eye. Corporations harvest these personal transmissions for profit, and stream ever more provocative content to keep us consuming instead of creating – rotting our psyches and isolating us further from one another.

/radio returns us to the golden age of technology. Through its vintage aesthetic, we are transported back to a time when communication machines served a singular purpose: to connect us to each other. No content, no reels, no slot machine. Just you and the person you’re trying to reach. The machine is present, but you’re in control. Once the conversation’s over, the radio becomes useless, but hopefully, you’ve been changed.

How can we become more human by interacting with machines? Can machines change us in better ways than we know today? Who might we become?

These are the questions I am exploring with mirror.me.

Read more about mirror.me/radio_v0 in-depth at its project page.