I love you more than I hate you

I love you more than I hate you is a gesture-controlled interaction piece made for the vertical feed. Five hand poses are recognized as five words, I, love, hate, more, you, and those five words assemble in sequence into three spoken sentences: "I love you." "I hate you." "I love you more." The hand composes; the machine speaks it back.
The vocabulary is deliberately small and deliberately loaded. With five tokens the system can say affection, its inversion, and its escalation, and nothing else. The gesture for love and the gesture for hate differ by a small shift of the same hand, so the boundary between them is not a choice of words but a movement of the body. The system will not resolve an unstable or in-between hand into a word. You have to commit, physically, to saying one or the other. That refusal to guess is the center of the piece.
It was made to live on a feed rather than in a gallery. Nothing is explained in voiceover or captions. The live hand skeleton and the spoken output teach the grammar by demonstration, so the work reads with the sound off and rewards turning it on. The vertical frame, the hand held at arm's length, and the scroll are treated as material conditions of the medium rather than as distribution.
Gesture interfaces are usually built as control surfaces: swipe, scroll, select. Treated as language instead, five words are enough to say the thing people find hardest to say plainly, and the title is the sentence the piece never quite lets you finish.