To Pray Without Ceasing

To Pray Without Ceasing is a web app that autonomously prays for people. It searches Twitter for expressions of need (e.g. "I need somebody to hug me right now" or "I need more money in my bank acct wtf"), especially those tweeted by users who have few followers and who are perhaps in need of solicitude. It then issues prayers for them using a variety of NLP techniques. Visitors of To Pray Without Ceasing must activate the system's prayers in a simple but symbolically significant way: they must light a candle (while making sure not to move the cursor too fast; one must proceed mindfully in sacred space). The action of lighting a candle is designed to make the system not "interactive" but rather what Robert Pfaller would call "interpassive"; the visitor delegates the work of praying—the practice of religion itself—to the machine, yet she still can feel vaguely responsible for whatever good work it does, whatever good words it utters. The system prays in different ways over the course of 24 hours, evoking the "Liturgy of the Hours" ("Horae Canonicae"). After 24 hours the sequence begins again, praying for a new batch of needs discovered on Twitter from the previous day. Thus the humble and pious work of paying attention to the needs of strangers is never finished.