Inter:Lace -- An Antagonistic Wearable for Outsourcing Social Self-Regulation

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly mediate everyday communication—assisting users with emails, tone, and social interactions—we observe a pattern in which the cognitive labor of social self-regulation is externalized and outsourced. Inter:Lace is a speculative wearable art project that explores the consequences of outsourcing social judgment to a large-language model-based assistive system. Designed to be worn as a conspicuous-looking choker, Inter:Lace monitors the conversational context of the wearer and performs “behavioral intervention” through a tightening mechanism designed to prompt politeness, composure, and social compliance. As a provocative object, Inter:Lace was designed and presented as a commercial product, accompanied by supporting materials, such as instructions and coupons. By positioning the piece as a marketable consumer good that induces bodily anxiety, both the object itself and its display aim to reveal a fundamental misalignment between social assistance and embodied experience in contemporary consumerism.