networked

Every hour, this bot draws language from wikiHow, repackages and recontextualizes it as a sexting message, and tweets it. Part of its process is to add pronouns “I,” “you,” or both to the instructions and actions described, in addition to prefacing each tweet with “sext.” Its output invites readers to interpret bland, utilitarian language metaphorically because it’s conceptually framed as sexting. The scenario of people sending sexually explicit messages back and forth, describing things they are doing to their bodies, contrasts sharply with the step-by-step instructions common to wikiHow, resulting in surprising and humorous results. Follow this bot on Twitter to learn many new euphemisms for sexual acts and the expressive potential of conceptual reframing. (Source: Editorial Statement from the works collection site)

Tiny Crossword is a daily game played publicly on Twitter. The bot posts a procedurally-generated three-word puzzle at noon PST. Players (any Twitter user) can @-reply with their proposed answer. After two hours, the bot posts the solution & credits the first player to have solved it. Twitter's constraints were designed for succinct handwritten messages, but bots explore what else can be expressed within those limits. The goal of this bot was to make a game that could fit into a tweet (117 characters with an image). Crediting the winner publicly also fits Twitter's form, where @-mentions can be a sign of admiration & prestige. Most bots generate content by taking a random walk through a large corpus. For Tiny Crossword, the corpus is Simple English Wikipedia; its brevity & plain language afford short puzzle clues. New puzzles are generated using up-to-date terms & concepts with no additional designer input.

This bot draws snippets of positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes (a film and TV review aggregator), changes the director or producer’s name to a Fox News anchor or personality, and tweets it every two minutes. This Twitter account and bot were produced by The Colbert Report as a response to the news that Fox News publicists had thousands of fake social media accounts to try to spin any postings or comments against their news channel. By recontextualizing praise for film and television performances, narrative, and directorial style, as well as adding the #PraiseFOX hashtag, this overwhelmingly frequent, positive praise comes across as ironic and absurd. Its output also serves as a kind of subtweet because whenever anyone searches for one of the Fox News personalities on Twitter they’re likely to get many “Real Human Praise.” Following this bot may prove to be too much for readers because its frequent endless tweeting will certainly accelerate the current in your Twitter stream.

This bot draws from a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) buoy which gathers oceanic and atmospheric data and mashes it up with text from Moby Dick. The buoy became unmoored on March 10, 2013 and was set adrift—still transmitting data—in the Pacific Ocean until found on November 4, 2015. The result of combining snippets of live data from this floating bot with text from Moby Dick grounds its maritime language in a real and changing yet geographically distant and indeterminate present. Surf this bot’s poetic wanderings to explore real and imagined seas. (Source: Editorial Statement from the works collection site)

This work creates an interactive drag-and-drop interface to perform keyword searches in Twitter and produce a manipulable visual mapping of the results. The hashtag/keywords used by Villegas are related to poetry, music, and suffering, which when selected produce a snapshot of recent tweets on the subject. Combining keywords narrows the search, offering more thematically focused results. Part of the fun of this work is in how it arranges the results into moveable lines, so readers can experience them in different sequences, placing the tweets in conversation as they form a kind of line constellation. The limits placed on the search, along with the juxtaposition of lines, and a design that responds to the reader’s clicking and dragging motions, results in a focused authorial poetic experience, though drawn from the endlessly vast and ever-changing Twitter stream. (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=poetuiteame)

In Eugenio Tisselli's own words, "[t]he global financial dictatorship presents us with a paradox: while the economic transactions capable of shifting the destinies of entire countries are the result of performative language, it is language itself that, in turn, is transformed and subjected to the flows of financial markets." In 1917, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution declared all land to be property of the people. This law protecting indigenous territories and communal modes of living was altered in 1992 as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into existence. El 27 || The 27th procedurally allegorizes the slow encroachment of finance capitalism and linguistic colonialism in to Mexican political life. Ever day that the New York Stock Exchange closes with a positive percent, a section of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution is translated from Spanish into a highly distorted computer-generated English. The work is a simply yet scathing expression of the loss of Mexican culture and political autonomy in the wake of NAFTA under the excesses of computational capitalism. The erosion of Mexican soil and culture at the hands of ultrafast algorithmic trading and linguistic robots will eventually terminate in a nonhuman textual landscape of speculative nonsense. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Channel of the North is a collaborative project by Jan Baeke and Alfred Marseille that combines data visualization, poetry, and telepresence through a series of poems that expand and contract based on the ebb and flow of the tides located in the Westerschelde river at the Dutch-Belgian border. Although a user may access this kinetic poetry anywhere in the world, the geological temporality of the poem is always rooted in a particular space and time in a way that sits in a tradition of artwork such as David Bowen’s tele-present water and tele-present wind. While the dissemination of text is not typically indexed to a physical referent, Channel of the North offers a contemplative moment when poetry becomes a vehicle for exploring the relationship between the flow of geological processes, the flow of networked computation, and the flow of language. Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network charts the long relationship between water and networked communication based on how the subterranean network of private undersea cables are connected to a history of empire, colonialism, and geopolitical conflict and commerce. These undersea undulations between channels of water and data find poetic expression in Baeke and Marseille’s work as the Westerschelde is made to flow through an interconnected network of oceanic and electric currents.

(Source: ELC 3)