2) Object-oriented twitter-bot-poetry
Materials: Artist-Participants, Elsewhere objects, Twitter app., open source bot algorithm
The Elsewhere object-bots perform on an endless labor loop on the Internet and create poetry out of the dreaming collective’s tweets (click on the links below to check out):
https://twitter.com/toysoldier606 by Ellis Anderson @toysoldier606
https://twitter.com/china_broken by Ava Zelkowitz @china_broken
https://twitter.com/CloseCups by Jordan Delzell @CloseCups
https://twitter.com/ElsewhereObject by Ash Smith @ElsewhereObject
https://twitter.com/boosad9 by Emily Ensminger @boosad9
https://twitter.com/otherghosttoy by Sophia Shultz @otherghosttoy
https://twitter.com/ArtSuitcase by Koy Smith @ArtSuitcase
The closed ecosystem of Elsewhere had us talking often about the cloud and it’s correlation to the objects being held captive forever as collection. On the other hand, our digital photographs are also being held captive in another kind of collection in the cloud. But forever is a slippery concept; things age, corrupt, rot, disintegrate—even the digital. We pondered, which would outlast which: the actual toy dog from the 1960’s or the image of that same toy dog stored in the cloud? Or: would they both outlast humans?
The digital and the non-digital objects sit tamed—for now—in different spaces, one in the cloud, the other in Elsewhere. To think about this more, we created twitter bots that could serve as digital avatars of some of the objects inside Elsewhere. A digital toy soldier who now tweets: “You're one piece of many. We're all in this together” whenever someone asks: “How did I get stuck here?” These newly assigned digital objects create object-bot-poetry in a kind of endless labor loop. Brought together in a new relationship, there is the materiality of the wood, organic polymers in the plastic and the natural world embedded within—then there is the AI-ness of the bot—conjoined towards techno-animism.
