looking outwards 8

Eyeo 2014 – Darius Kazemi from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Programmer Darius Kazemi’s work focuses mostly on building autonomous bots and generative toys that do random and absurd things. His intention for these projects is mostly to make himself laugh but in the end he finds the bots doing interesting unexpected things on the internet. He has created a twitter bot called “Autocharts” where once a day it tweets an absurd flow chart and he has also created a tumblr bot called “Scenes from the Wire”. His best known project “Amazon Shopper randomizer” is a program that he gives a 50 dollar amazon gift card once a month and the program buys random items, specifically books, cds, and dvds and nails it to his house. He made the bot’s amazon account from scratch and essentially the program works with amazon’s algorithms from the recommended list to create a personality for the bot as he keeps buying every month. Kazemi creates this interesting dynamic between the bot, amazon and himself as the bot delivers $50 worth of content that he can watch, read or listen to each month. In his programming work Kazemi makes a point about composing for infinity – meaning that a simple for loops ( in a few seconds) can generate more information than a human being can consume in a lifetime. This is a fact that creative programmers confront when making art with code and what the difference between the traditional creative process.