HKU Media Bot

A twit­ter­bot that pub­lish­es an auto-gen­er­at­ed poem once every hour, based on the words used in all first grade teach­ing mod­ules with­in the Media Fac­ul­ty of the Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts (HKU).

 

For this twit­ter­bot I used trac­ery, a sto­ry-gram­mar gen­er­a­tion library for javascript. The script gen­er­ates a short new poem, loose­ly based on the Japan­ese Haiku poet­ic form. It uses all nouns, verbs and adjec­tives from the teach­ing mod­ule descrip­tions of all the fields of study with­in HKU Media (Audio Visu­al Media, Image and Media Tech­nol­o­gy, Ani­ma­tion, Illus­tra­tion, Graph­ic Design and Pho­tog­ra­phy). I used cheap­bots­donequick to cre­ate the twit­ter­bot part.

This twit­ter­bot, togeth­er with the Teach­ing mod­ule gen­er­a­tor instal­la­tion, was part of a research project com­mis­sioned by the Exper­tise­cen­trum Edu­catie of HKU Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts, on the pos­si­bil­i­ties of lan­guage tech­nol­o­gy with­in an art cur­ricu­lum, whether for ana­lyt­i­cal pur­pos­es, or as a toolk­it with­in a cre­ative process. This project, with this instal­la­tion as a ‘proof of con­cept’, is also a plea for embrac­ing more emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, data visu­al­iza­tion and nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing in art edu­ca­tion.

Year

2016

Kind

Twit­ter­bot / Instal­la­tion

Location

HKU Media, Utrecht

Sym­po­sium on lan­guage, curat­ed by Cor­rie Nagte­gaal