“In that Tyrant’s pow’r”: artbots and collisions with social crisis

In the post-truth era, the term “bot” is used to describe automated social media accounts spreading misinformation, as well as humans acting behind “dummy” accounts. However, the ways that bots intersect with political and social discourse on social media is far more textured. Bots that generate flash fictions, text art or other pieces often intersect with the political and social discourses on Twitter in both uncomfortable and triumphant fashion.

These “artbots”, unlike misinformation bots, are inherently hypermedial, always reminding the audience of their automatic nature. The ideal artbot is sincere, and the generative patterns they follow are often transparent. Consequently, these bots occupy a different space in the post-truth social media discourse. They are not malicious automations to be shut-down, nor are they human posters engaging intelligently in conversation. Artbots post indiscriminatorily: they innocently follow their patterns of generative art, resulting in poetic timings and uncomfortable collisions with Twitter’s discourse. Examples include the “Emote! at the location” Twitterbot stating “Calm down! At the protest” amid #BlackLivesMatter protests this year, igniting a discourse around emotion and social justice within the tweet’s comments.

To interrogate the functions and meanings that emerge when an automation’s pattern collides with social discourses, this paper presents a visualisation of #BlackLivesMatter tweets, contrasted against artbot posts. By mapping the collisions between moments in the movement with artbot postings, our analysis explores the ethics of botmaking as creative practice, and the role of automated entities in constructing and framing post-truth political discourse as dialogue creators, rather than propogandists.