Tweeting the cosmos: On the bot poetry of The Ephemerides

Abstract

This article discusses Twitter bots that generate textual outputs for aesthetic effect. It considers in-detail a specific instance, The Ephemerides ( @the_ephemerides ) by Allison Parrish, and presents a critical assessment of how its functional and thematic attributes meditate self-reflexively upon their operational contexts within digital infrastructure. This mode of reading is then presented as having value for analysing generative Twitter bots more widely. The initial balance of this article will concern the broader question of how generative digital writing can be assessed critically, debating key claims made by Simanowski (2011), before presenting a model in which the salient quality of this art form is the distinctly machinic modes of expression it makes available, revealing the software itself to be an active agent in the reading encounter. The remainder of this article will then apply this perspective to a reading of The Ephemerides, considering its meditation on the functional and aesthetic relationship between technical systems that are unobtrusively efficient versus those that are vividly breaking down – with the latter making manifest the contingency that is inherent to the processes of coming to know and act on the world through technology. The goal of this discussion is to consider not only how the generative operations of Twitter bots might be approached fruitfully, but to demonstrate also that such analyses constitute a worthwhile pursuit in the first instance – that even these tightly constrained instances of digital creativity can offer forms expression that reward extended academic criticism.