Hackers & Designers Summer Session: Botnet
Text to Speech
Together with An Mertens, we ran a workshop at the Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2015 (http://summer.hackersanddesigners.nl/). Continuing work with IRC chatbots, the workshop was a crash course in the inherent sociality of software from the shell to a bot, and the literary possibilities of pipeline programming.
IRC is a natural space for code to perform together and interact. In final installation, a "designerbot" injects fragments from a (Metahaven) design manifesto, a "fembot" gives encouraging comments to an assumed female subject, "haikubot" attempts to reformulate previous chat fragments according to the constraints of haiku verse, a speechbot renders conversation as an animated speaking mouth, and a "posturebot" uses face detection to instruct an observed user on their sitting habits.
Code available at: https://github.com/hd-onions/hackersanddesigners
source
Gloss