Overview:
- Bot readings (and optional materials)
- Looking Outwards #03: Bots
- Give some thought to your Image Publishing Bot, which is due as part of the Gauntlet Assignment on January 28th.
1. Bot Readings.
On Thursday, January 21, Twitter bot legend Darius Kazemi will visit our class. In advance of his presentation, and in advance of our Image Bot assignment, please read the following resources:
- A Brief History Of The Future Of Twitter Bots, by Michael Cook (15 minutes)
- A Call for Bots of Conviction: A protest bot is a bot so specific you can’t mistake it for bullshit, by Mark Sample (15 minute read)
- 12 Weird, Excellent Twitter Bots Chosen by Twitter’s Best Bot-Makers, by Lainna Fader (15 minutes
Optional additional readings and viewings:
If you’re interested in bots in a more serious way, below are some additional (optional) resources. I particularly recommend this fantastic 40-minute presentation by Allison Parrish, recorded at the 2015 Eyeo Festival:
Additional resources include:
- Short presentations from the 2014 Bot Summit (collection of brief video presentations)
- 10 Best Twitterbots that are also net art (article)
- Watch The Secret Life of Pronouns
- Be sure to check out great bots like:
pentametron – a strong example of recontextualization via curation
wikisext – an excellent use of a unique corpus (WikiHow) combined with the “internet native form” of sexting
Looking Outwards #03: Bots
You’ve got a lot to do, so let’s keep this simple. Identify a Twitter bot that you find interesting, and write a paragraph about what you like about it. It could be one that you encountered in your readings, or one crafted by well-known creators like Allison Parrish, Darius Kazemi, Thricedotted, Nora Reed, Tully Hansen, (CMU’s own) Katie Rose Pipkin, someone else entirely, or even one of the ones made by last year’s IACD students.
In writing your Looking Outwards post, be sure to embed a few examples of the posts made by the bot you like. You can learn how to embed tweets in WordPress here or here. A properly embedded tweet looks like this:
Produce a dangerous project about cats on the internet, due in 11 seconds.
— Art Assignment Bot (@artassignbot) February 20, 2015
3. Give some thought to your own Image Bot
You have an image-publishing bot due on January 28th, as part of the Gauntlet assignment. Give some thought to it. There is no deliverable at this time, but: Make some notes in your sketchbook, or stash some links. Will your bot generate images? Extract and republish them from some other feed? Retrieve them from a database of some sort?
You might enjoy browsing this list of very large image databases, which we will also be working with later in the semester.