Pickles at Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2025

Pickles: to Ferment our Lives

Pickles is a journaling companion designed to support reflection, awareness, and personal evolution. At its core, journaling is not simply the act of recording daily events. It is a practice of looking back at the flow of emotions and thoughts, and by putting them into words, gaining new insights. Psychology has shown that writing down one’s emotions can have therapeutic effects; Pickles extends this principle into a structured, supportive tool. Yet journaling is more than self-care. It is also a form of self-research, treating the self as a site where countless phenomena unfold. By observing and writing, we can notice questions we had not yet recognized, or deepen the ones already within us. We describe this process as a form of “fermentation”: the gradual transformation of accumulated reflections into meaningful knowledge. Pickles is designed to assist in this fermentation of memory. Once a week, Pickles reads the journals you keep privately in platforms such as Notion or Google Docs. It then sends an email pointing out subtle connections you may not have noticed, or suggesting questions that might spark further reflection. Importantly, Pickles does not replace the act of journaling itself. The meaning emerges from your writing. The AI only nudges gently, avoiding definitive interpretations, leaving space for your own discovery. By writing your life, finding meaning, and receiving these weekly prompts, Pickles sustains the practice of journaling and helps cultivate the ongoing fermentation of your life experience. Currently, Pickles operates as a closed experiment with beta testers. 《酸瓜》是一款日記輔助工具，旨在支援個人反思、認知及進化。就其核心而言，書寫日記不只單純為記錄日常事物，它是一種回顧情緒及容讓思想流動的練習，並能將之轉化成文字，從而獲得新的領悟。心理學已能證明，寫下個人的情緒可以產生治療效果；而《酸瓜》可以將這個原則延伸為一個結構化、支援性的工具。然而書寫日記不單止是一種自我關顧，它也是一種自我硏究，它將自我視為無數現象伸展的場所，通過觀察與書寫，人們可以發現自己尙未意識到的問題，又或是加深內心已有問題的思考。人們可將這個過程視為一種「發酵」，將累積的反思逐漸轉化為有意義的知識。《酸瓜》就是為了協助這種記憶發酵而設計的。每星期一次，《酸瓜》會閱讀閣下在Notion或Google文件等平台上的私人日記，然後它會傳送一封電郵，指出用家可能沒有注意到的微妙關聯，又或建議可能會引發的進一步思考。重要的是，《酸瓜》並不會取代書寫日記的行為本身，因為意義源自於個人書寫，而AI不過是提供溫柔提示，避免作出明確的詮釋，為用家留下個人發現的空間。通過用家寫下個人的生活，在當中尋找意義，並接收到這些每周的提示，《醬菜》可協助用家維持書寫日記的習慣，並培養生活經驗的持續發酵。目前《酸瓜》以封閉式實驗的方式運作，並有beta測試版。