rgroves – Looking Outward – 08

I watched Darius Kazemi’s talk on harnessing the power of infinity when making art with code. Kazemi is what he calls an “internet artist,” making a huge quantity of simple projects, mostly bots, parodying pop culture, the news, and internet memes. He begins his lecture by demonstrating that by writing only a couple lines of code, he can generate an infinite list of random numbers – more content than a human can consume in a lifetime. He then presents a formula for translating this power into meaningful art: “Templated Authorship + Random Input + Context.” He goes on to explain how his popular twitter bot Two Headlines uses this formula to create effective content. It takes current headlines and swaps the most important phrase in the headline with a different news topic. The new headlines are funny because they satirize stories that are already being talked about a lot and often the words that are switched out create a new meaning that is unexpectedly pertinent. Using the same template on Shakespeare titles or very old headlines would not be as funny because they would not be relevant – that’s where the “context” part of the formula comes in.
He has made an absolutely vast quantity of twitter bots and even though they are all quite simple, they are still effective and funny because of this formula.

http://tinysubversions.com/