Twitter Bot Memorial
Between 2016 and 2022, I made five Twitter bots. Now, four of them are no longer active. This page records their memory.
Each was created in a brief fit of obsession, but after some years I felt that they done what they were made to do and their potential was exhausted. Now the sun has set on the golden age of the Twitter art bot; these were my contributions to that moment.
They are survived by one sibling, Lyre's Dictionary.
Required Reading
My first bot was Required Reading, made for PROCJAM 2016, which posted randomly generated textbook titles. It was a fruitful experiment in recontextualization, finding thematic keywords in a text corpus and clipping the surrounding phrases to become titles.
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Gorgar Speaks
My second bot was Gorgar Speaks. Miriam Nadler and I made it together as she shared her love of pinball with me. Gorgar, created in 1979, was the first pinball machine to employ spoken words. The machine had a vocabulary of six-words, which were combined in various ways. This constituting a "Gorgar Grammar", it felt appropriate to grant it free rein in procedural form.
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Barbarella GIF Bot
My third bot was Barbarella GIF Bot. It posted a random gif from the 1968 film Barbarella once each day. It was inspired by a now-ended Hackers GIF Bot, with both sharing code taken from an earlier work by Lindsey Bieda. I was very enthusiastic about the movie at the time, and this was the result.
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Stock Photo Dog
My fifth and final bot was Stock Photo Dog, which existed for only a single day. It was meant to be an interactive bot that would listen to your tweets and respond to any that included words like "treat" or "walk" with a photo of a very excited dog. But even after going to the effort of coding it, I got cold feet and didn't want to give myself the burden of maintaining an interactive bot.
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