Moth Generator (@mothgenerator) is an interactive, multi-faceted, collaborative digital artwork by Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt. The following statements illustrate its complexity and set the stage for an eventual preservation plan for this work:
Moth
Moth Generator (@mothgenerator) is an interactive, multi-faceted, collaborative digital artwork by Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt. The following statements illustrate its complexity and set the stage for an eventual preservation plan for this work:
Moth Generator is:
- A Twitter feed where moths are regularly published and @replies are used as moth-generating text
- A collection of computer-generated moth images and names, including looping animations created from generated moths and reused for other purposes
- An element of a complex virtual world project
- A collaboration between a game designer and an artist whose work deals in large part with code and bots
- A relatively well-known example of a Twitter bot
what is a bot?
To better understand Moth Generator in context, we might begin with a Wikipedia summary: A bot is a “software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet.”
Woolley et al. (2016) point to the ubiquity of bots performing invisible work on which the internet runs, and also to “an emergent kind of bot, capable of interacting with humans and acting on their behalf, [that] is playing a more active role in our everyday lives.” Of these, social bots (or socialbots, as this New York Times article spells it) are some of the most visible thanks to their interactions with users within the constraints of social media platforms. Twitter bots are a specific instance of social bot: Twitter accounts that publish posts and/or interact with users based on running certain kinds of inputs through programs.
Twitter bots come in many forms, offering social and political commentary (often accidental), absurd juxtapositions, and variations on jokes, to give a few examples. As Woolley et al. write, “Bots can be useful for making value systems apparent, revealing obfuscated information, and amplifying the visibility of marginalized topics or communities.” Protest bots (per Mark Sample) certainly do this, but so might art bots not explicitly dedicated to social commentary. Describing some of her bot work, Pipkin has said:
Looking at my source code for those projects now is very much like looking at an outsider-art approach to computer science. Which is, I suppose, what they are.
When asked in an interview, “What, indeed, are bots?” Pipkin pointed to their descent from other forms of automata: “Digital bots (especially bots that live in social spaces) fit into this long history of objects granted almost-humanness. They fill in for a part of human action, the slice of person granted to digital representations of ourselves.” Woolley et al. write, “One distinguishing feature of bots is that they are semi-autonomous: they exhibit behavior that is partially a function of the intentions that a programmer builds into them, and partially a function of algorithms and machine learning abilities that respond to a plenitude of inputs.” Bots and their designers perpetually navigate the boundary between intent and accident, including ethical issues involved in giving bots more or less free rein.
Woolley et al. are clear about the upsides to the thoughtful use and study of bots, even as they call (in their “bot-ifesto”) for critical attention to and policy-building around them: “By embracing messiness, those who make, use, and interact with bots open themselves to the automated creativity, innovation, and unpredictability so central to the web.” That Pipkin and Schmidt operate in this emerging space contributes to the significance of Moth Generator as an ongoing work of digital art.
how does @mothgenerator work?
Text input for moth creation has multiple sources. The bot periodically generates and tweets moths whose names are randomly pulled and combined from a set of about 10,000 Latin moth names and 4,000 English names, all real. Pipkin used a web crawler to build the two name pools. An example is below (and more appear throughout the post):
bopteryx hodgannascus pic.twitter.com/7pLAkAK0w2
— moth generator (@mothgenerator) March 5, 2016
Another extremely compelling source of input is tweets from other users. The artists have programmed Moth Generator to use @replies to @mothgenerator to “seed” new moths. A recent example is below:
— moth generator (@mothgenerator) March 19, 2016
stakeholders and significance
Assessing and unpacking the significance of Moth Generator requires identifying major stakeholders in its long-term preservation. What each stakeholder values about Moth Generator must be considered — and negotiated between — in order to produce, execute, review, and update a preservation plan.
Pipkin and Schmidt, the artists behind the bot, are the primary stakeholders in preserving Moth Generator. It’s possible to draw out key concerns from interviews, talks, and blog posts about Twitter bots in general and this project in particular.
Although this project is typically referred to as a Twitter bot, Pipkin has described Moth Generator as a drawing process for which Twitter acts as publishing platform (interview by Fader, 2015). In other words, the drawing program at the heart of Moth Generator is the key component, and @mothgenerator is just one of many possible instances of its implementation. As further evidence of the drawing program’s importance, Schmidt emphasized a link between Moth Generator and entomological illustration in an interview: “Though our own moths ar