On Friday, May 25 I made toothpaste as part of a Toothpaste & Code event that Oliver and I had organised at Kuusi Palaa.To do this I scoured the internet for recipes, and the reasons behind the ingredients, and then combined some of what I found into a simple easy-to-make but allegedly effective toothpaste. I promised to post the recipe online.

Here, two weeks later than intended, is a corrected version of what I did.

Alexa is Amazon’s AI-ish household assistant. It lives inside a device called an Echo, and acts as a hub. You connect it to other devices from televisions and phones to heating systems.It sits listening to everything you say, waiting to hear you say “Alexa”, at which point it interprets the next thing you say as a command and does what it thinks you have told it to do.

Once in a while it might like to tell someone else about this.

This essay exists because I needed to test some ideas in practice; ideas concerning the different ways one’s mind works in different circumstances, and particularly in extreme circumstances where it does not receive much if any external input. I need to test these ideas as part of a larger project, which in turn forms the cornerstone of my doctoral research.

For some years I have been exploring the ways in which certain kinds of synthetic (or “virtual”) worlds may be used for self-exploration and self-learning. When we “enter” a synthetic world we switch our attention from external reality to a carefully constructed pseudo-reality in which the ebb and flow of narrative obeys very different rules.