twitterbot

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A Twitterbot remix of "This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Poem for Phones” by J. R. Carpenter.

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The sky clears its schedule. Gentle breezes. Lavender in need of attention. The river brings along a novel. #thisisapictureofwind

Late summer thunder. Heat rising out of nowhere. Elegiac, but we’ll take it. #thisisapictureofwind

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This is a Picture of Wind Twitterbot
By leahhenrickson, 13 August, 2018
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7.1
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Abstract (in English)

Textual analysis places great emphasis on determining the development and direction of authorial intention to illuminate a text’s layers of meaning. How, though, is one to determine the development of authorial intention in a text that appears to remove the traditional human author? This paper explores issues of authorship presented to genetic criticism (critique génétique) by algorithmically-produced texts – that is, texts produced through programmed logic in a computer rather than through direct human agency – such as those of the Twitter bot Pentametron (twitter.com/pentametron). This paper considers the perceived importance of authorship and human agency in the creation of a text. Algorithmic texts challenge contemporary notions of textual creation and development, in turn posing challenges to genetic criticism that are similar to those posed by cut-up texts in other media. This paper argues that Pentametron’s rather nonsensical algorithmic output stresses the reader’s responsibility for meaning-making, and suggests that such algorithmic texts are not so much final texts to be subjected to genetic critique themselves, but are more aptly considered to be forms of avant-texte. These avant-textes serve as inspiration for human-computer symbioses, for re-creations wherein readers make sense out of the seemingly senseless.

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Description (in English)

This project was inspired from the magic realist stories of Jorge Luis Borges, but the process is automated by a computer-generated bot that are posting poetry on twitter.

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Description (in English)

Dada was a mental system cracker. Think about the poem-algorithm. dadaoverload adapts the mechanics and adds the destruction mode. Tweets are fighting for dominance in this society of the spectacle. enough dada! “zersetze dada!” The world is filled with a dada overload. Today’s source material for Dada are tweets and spam messages, ads and any kind of short messages. Dada (Tzara) used newspaper clippings, cut them down to words and randomly reassembled them. Dada was a creative process in 1916. Today, 100 years later, Dada is everywhere and nowhere. It is massive disintegration of language and communication. It is a process of decomposition as tweets retweet themselves to stay alive. Our Dada destroys tweets. It subverts, undermines, disintegrates and decomposes tweeted messages. You have a stream of live tweets from different sources. You choose a tweet and shoot individual letters out into the tweet universe. Each letter bullet hits a tweet and disintegrates all equivalent letters in this tweet. The tweet now reads different. This happens fast and to all tweets on screen. One of Saturday, July 22 • 579 the tweets becomes the main tweet in the center and shows the process in oversize. Once in a while, you get a full word as bullet. This starts a creative process. The full word shows up in orange and recompose the incomplete gappy tweets: Reality. Truth, Naivity. You also get the choice of intervening with your own inputs and see how you feel when your annotations get destroyed by the Dada Overload bullets. [There are some enhancements. Try them out. You can click together a longer text. You can pause the stream and read the output easier. You can put in your own text spam. You can take an instant picture. You can send a dadaoverload tweet and get an answer from the dadaoverload bot.]

 

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

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Source: Screenshot of dadaoverload webpage
By Hannah Ackermans, 8 December, 2016
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In this paper, I regard generative literature as a model-object from the perspective of Mahr and Erdbeer’s application of model theory in order to give insight into the functioning of generative literature as well as further specify the new research focus of literary model theory (Erdbeer 2014). Through the modelling practice of literature generators, own preconceptions of what literature is (supposed to be), are projected. In its algorithmic writing, generative literature mimics intention-typical literature while at the same time destabilizing its very foundations. Through multiple short case study analyses, I outline (1) how generative literature self-reflexive in the sense that it is a model of literature, (2) how literary models change due to practices in generative literature and (3) how temporality is modelled in generative literature.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

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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.