Matt Schneider – I ❤️ E-Poetry

Jorge Borges @BabellingBorges Each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. — Open “Jorge Borges (@BabellingBorges)” by Matt Schneider

This bot tirelessly carries out a task too large for it to complete within a human lifetime: it explores an idea posed by Jorge Luis Borges in his story “The Library of Babel” of an infinite library full of books that contain a different combination of 23 letters and punctuation marks. “Each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters” (Schneider quotes Borges in the bot’s description). With this bot, Schneider illustrates the concept of this library via Twitter’s own constraints by tweeting 140 characters randomly chosen from 23 alphabetic characters, punctuation marks, and spaces. The result is pure language noise. . . or is it?

These two bots generate short template based sentences and publish them on Twitter every 10 minutes. With them Schneider demonstrates some of the versatility of the same kind of device when applied to different topics.

His first bot, “@tonightiate,” uses a relatively simple template that produces an obsessive litany of consumption.

Open “@tonightiate” “@MassageMcLuhan” by Matt Schneider

The opening constant phrase “Tonight I ate” reads like a musical refrain, particularly when read as a focused stream on the account page. The use of tonight evokes the semantic frame of supper through the time of eating reinforces it with variations of side dishes and garnishes. By pulling in random nouns as things to be eaten, the work creates delectable logical clashes, mixing semantic frameworks with the power of pure randomness. The opening phrase adjusts to the time of day, based on Eastern Time zone, which enhances its absurdity in the context of a global social network. The bot therefore serves tweet-sized portions of meaningful nonsense that comment on how everything can be consumed these days.