The recipe is reflective of Paranoid Android by Radiohead: when I tweet something, the system replies to me with “i may be paranoid but not an android.” To correspond to the lyrics, I chose to tweet “what’s that”:

At first I thought this would create an infinite loop of my account tweeting “i may be paranoid but not an android” every five minutes or so but I soon find out that was not the case. Either twitter has a system that blocks tweets that contain the same content as the tweet that came before or IFTTT considers “new tweets” as original tweets and not tweets spawned from IFTTT (highly possible that it’s the latter as they want to avoid a case of the infinite loop). But I still like the recipe, even though its sole function is to amuse myself with the inside joke of “haha, it’s like the machine tweeted back that it’s not an android to me after I asked what’s that.”

I experimented with more recipes, changing my tactics:

This one uses hashtags instead to enable specificity in what gets tweeted after. So for the new tweet, I specified it to have “#whatsthat” so that the action becomes tweeting “#imaybeparanoidbutnotanandroid”. I made another recipe to make use of this hashtag specificity, but this one did not work well. I made the trigger “#imaybeparanoidbutnotanandroid” and the action “#whatsthat” in order for the two recipes to bounce off each other, but the recipes did not react to each other as I had hoped. Meaning, the third recipe did not get triggered at all, probably because of the conjectures I made about “new tweets” in the previous paragraph. Oh well. Technology!

Some thoughts about IFTTT, Art and the API, and Formula for Computer Art: I like how these actions are scripted beforehand. There is a formula for it, which means anyone with the means can do it; they do not have to create the template, as there is already a template. Creativity is left to what they do with the template, which is provided by the API. Interesting thing is, the function of these API is to generate connections, just as art is the bridge between one thing to another, from creator to the viewer, from vision to execution, from idea to consequence.