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Fall 2021 Panel:
Hosted by the Social Media Narratives Class
Combinatory Twitter Bots I started making combinatory Twitter bots in 2015 after I learned how to use Kate Compton’s "Tracery" and v buckenham's "Cheap Bots Done Quick". Initially, I created two bots dedicated to the Mexican writer and book theorist Ulises Carrión. The first one, @BotCarrion, is based on his manifesto “The New Art of Making Books” and seeks to highlight Carrión’s diction and interrogate his proposals about book arts and literature. The second one, @UC_Poesias_Bot, uses Carrión’s Poesías as a hypotext to emulate his poetic series “estructuras,” “ritmos,” “funciones,” etc. When I made these two bots I was captivated by Carrión’s work and I wanted to popularize his insights and his irreverence, which I still think is very interesting and relevant for our media moment. @tinyrelations was a later creation and more playful one. It follows the poetics of the world of tiny bots ( @TinyProtests, @thetinygallery, @tiny_star_field, among many others) which use emojis or other Unicode characters to create really beautiful landscapes and scenes. With @tinyrelations, I was particularly interested in adding an element of time passing to the landscapes common in the Tiny universe, which is why I used the episodic sense that acts have in plays. I also added a clock emoji to every act to signal that each is a short period during which people meet, activities are done, feelings are had, and relationships thrive or end. In addition to following the Tiny universe, I like how many associations can be gleaned from any given combination of emojis, and therefore how much their effectiveness relies on how much imaginative work a reader is willing to put in. On a different level, the bots in the Tiny universe are most often just really cute to look at even if they are not always pleasant or positive. Something that has drawn me to combinatory twitter bots is how prolific they can be and, therefore, how many surprising things they yield. The fact that they live on Twitter makes them feel, precisely, like they are alive somewhere doing their thing and (hopefully) positively infiltrating themselves in the regular doomscrolling that Twitter timelines can sometimes be. Ultimately, I like to think of the Tiny universe as a modular corner of Twitter where the individuals in my @tinyrelations are maybe hanging out @thetinygallery or looking @tiny_star_field – that is, where they exist in the presence of peers. |
2021 Panelists
Meredith D. Clark
Shaohua Guo
Mark Marino
Jeff Nunokawa
Élika Ortega
Abraham Richie
Katrin Tiidenberg
SAIC ATS Class in Social Media Narrative Host: SAIC ATS Part-time Faculty:Judy Malloy |
Élika Ortega is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on digital literature and media, cultural hybridity, reading practices, books, and digital humanities. She is currently writing her first monograph, tentatively titled Binding Media: Print-Digital Literature, 1980s–2010s, in which she investigates print-digital works of literature from Argentina to Canada.