ROM

This bot explores a corpus of textual data from videogame ROM (Read Only Memory), selecting a random snippet, adding a hashtag for the source, mentioning the platform in parenthesis, and publishing the results every three hours. This textual data isn’t just text displayed by the games when they’re running, but also their programming code, which means that its text is sometimes gibberish (perhaps from obfuscated code), formatted using coding conventions, and strange enough to be poetic. This is a rewarding bot to follow from a Critical Code Studies perspective because it invites reflection on the choices made by programmers for variables, data, and language.

Super Mario Clouds is an old Mario Brothers NES cartridge which was modified by the artist, where everything but the clouds in the game is erased. In addition to the work itself, the artist also released a full instruction guide sharing the how-to for similar modifications as well as source code and relevant game files.