Posts Tagged ‘bots’

Identity and Simulation. Artificial Life on the Networks

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

With Jussi Parikka, Pau Waelder, Aymeric Mansoux and Mónica Bello. Recorded (VO EN/ES) in Barcelona the 24th of February 2012 as part of the I+C+i Our Life Online session at CCCB.
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UNITE TO ACHIEVE AN EVEN GREATER FRIENDSHIP!

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

After a few days tinkering and sweating with CSS, PHP, Gimp, Inkscape and Google webfonts, it is with a glorious partisan chant that we are delightfully excited to present the new design for the game intro. There is still some fine tuning to do but this is now pretty much the default entrance to Elastic Versailles if you come to the game main URL.

Most of the look and feel has been based on the small research on state controlled newspapers and blogs, as well as propaganda poster strategies. The latter led to the repurposing and adaptation of more than 60, mostly Republic of China’s, slogans that are now used as straplines from the Naked on Pluto news site.

Next step now is to make some ads that match the different activities going on in Elastic Versailles, and work on the data that is gathered by the bots which are authoring this propaganda site.

Bots as WordPress Editors

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

As mentioned in previous posts, we have resumed our work on Naked on Pluto and are at the moment working on the idea of a newspaper which content would be entirely generated by bots. Nothing new under the sun, as automated blogging and generating content from the output of scraping spiders has been increasingly popular to drive traffic in order to generate ad clicks or to manipulate its readers in downloading some malware. The difference here is that our content will be the result of various interviews and reports “written” by a couple of newsbots wandering in Elastic Versailles.

Just like our cleaner bot, we will be using existing platforms, more precisely the newspaper will be a good old WordPress blog and each bot will have its own editor account. Thanks to XML-RPC, making the bridge between EVr14 ecosystems and the blog was quite trivial.

#!/usr/bin/python

import xmlrpclib, sys

target = 'http://nothing.now/xmlrpc.php'

if len(sys.argv) >= 6:
    try:
        post = {'title': sys.argv[4], 
                'description': sys.argv[5], 
                'categories': [sys.argv[3]]}
        blog = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(target)
        blog.metaWeblog.newPost('Plutonian Times', 
                                sys.argv[1], 
                                sys.argv[2], 
                                post, 
                                1)
    except:
        print 'OOPS: ' + str(sys.exc_info()[1])
else:
    print 'Usage: '+sys.argv[0]+' user password category title content'

We still have to figure out what kind of generative information will be made with this script when it’s called from scheme, but no matter what in a couple of days we should have the first edition of this newspaper up and running!

Residency @ BALTAN – a report from Dave

Monday, October 18th, 2010

The residency we did in september at NIMk was almost exclusively using paper and pens as we were working together to design our game world. We could go for walks while thinking, and mostly keep to analogue methods.

This residency was very different – naturally at this stage focused on the software, we started with an initial list of showstopping things to fix, and then used online methods of organisation via mantis and the wiki.

We also presented the project for the first time, at NIMk’s space invaders event, and we had some super volunteers from Eindhoven Technical University Game Experience Lab to test the game (which Aymeric describes in more detail).

One of the things that I was pleased to get a chance to tackle was how to cope with the basics of online multiplayer games: (more…)