Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
~2~
CONTENTS ~
Editors Note Nathan T. Dean
THE WORK:
Norns Thomas Jude Barclay Morrison
www.tjbmorrison.com
INTERLUDE ILLUSTRATIONS:
Septych: The Tree of Grief Sean Oxspring
oxyoxspring.co.uk
SOUNDTRACK:
Roots Myles Curwen
myles-curwen.bandcamp.com/album/roots
THE INTERVIEW:
Robots Paintbrush Anthony Prestia / @GreatArtBot
~3~
~4~
EDITORS NOTE
by NATHAN T. DEAN
The Hostess prepares for the
opening of the next exhibition. The
Wrenboy sells dream weevils down
at the market.
That was the last tweet from the @ESOTERICAZINE twitter
account, from the world I am trying to build around this little
corner of eccentric writing and now artwork being curated.
The characters were born out of translating this zine into an
entire universe, easily shifting into a Victoriana Orphanpunk
landscape of dusty art galleries and electric museums, of which
exists the little gallery owned by The Hostess, with her secondin-command, the Wrenboy. They are now ready to let you see
what the phantoms our writers and creators have sent into
the depths of the gallery, which, in this reality, is the zine you are
reading now.
It seemed apt to make the world of the zine in such a
manner, especially after you devour the work of this issue.
Weve expanded once more since Volume One, now opening
the rusty gateway of the weird to artists. This issue contains THE
TREE OF GRIEF, by SEAN OXSPRING, who has pushed his
original image through twitter algorithms relating to depression;
the tweets directly influenced the artwork and created the seven
images you see here, each named after one of the seven deadly
sins. Also, were proud to announce our first interview, this
issue looking at the twitterbot generated glitchwork of
ANTHONY PRESTIA: read my email-chat with him at the back of
the issue. We also, to complement the new imagery, have new
sounds, music composed by MYLES CURWEN specifically for
this issue that youll receive if youve bought this zine (or if you
go directly to his bandcamp).
~5~
~6~
~7~
NORNS
by THOMAS JUDE BARCLAY MORRISON
...the Norns who live near the Well of Fate
draw water from it every day . . . and
besprinkle the Cosmic Tree so that its
branches shall not wither or decay.
The Prose Edda
Three knowing Norns,
From the Well beneath the Tree:
Fate, Becoming and Necessity are their names.
They make laws, they choose lives,
They set our fates.
The Poetic Edda
The silver ship plummets from the star-strewn stratosphere, like
a phosphorescent, quicksilver meteor. At first it is but a rapidly
falling point of pure white light, but its brilliant circle swells as it
descends, until the hull's metallic disk obscures a substantial
swathe of sky, directly above you. It halts with impossible
suddenness, some one hundred feet in the air, and hangs
absolutely motionless, in perfect silence.
In the centre of the looming hull, a hatch irises open, and
blinding white-blue light comes beaming down all around you,
pinning you in the centre of a dazzling circle. Paralysed,
weightless, your rag-doll body rises on the rays, ascending to the
ship, drawn as by gravity to the source of the amnesiac light,
which smothers you with anaesthesia as it swallows you. The last
thing you remember is strange, skinny, silhouetted figures inside
the hatch, and three-fingered hands reaching out to you.
~
~8~
~9~
Our kind have dwelt beyond your cosmos since long before
it began, and it was we who carefully planted its seed in the
fertile soil of the garden. That seed was so small that it occupied
no space, and so dark that it actively devoured light and under
our care, it germinated, and quickly grew, until it had become a
majestic tree, with many a deep-delving root, and a complex
crown of boughs and branches.
Your eyes can see nothing of the tree's stately trunks and
limbs, and you will never behold the colours of its leaves, or the
textures of its bark, or the grain of its wood, for light and even
x-rays, radio waves, and all other forms of electromagnetic
radiation pass unhindered through by far the greater part of its
substance. Your eyes can see only the trillions of twinkling
blossoms, trailing the boughs and branches in galactic filaments
although you have inferred the existence of the underlying
structure's substance, from the way that the clustered flowers
keep clinging to the branches, like dewdrops clinging to a
spider's otherwise invisible web.
Your cosmos is very young it has only just begun to
flower, and its fruit is far from ripe. It has only been in flower
for just under fourteen billion of your mayfly years, and will not
cease flowering until some one hundred trillion of those years
have gone by and even then most of its life will still lie ahead
of it. Its blacker-than-black fruit forms in the centre of each
galactic whorl of blossom, like holes in the starry sky. In the
centre of each fruit there is a cosmic seed, and when the harvest
time comes when the fruit has at last ripened, long after the
last blossom has fallen we will pluck every last fruit from the
tree, and from the garnered seed grow a new generation of
universes.
There are many other trees in the garden, and many of
them are very different to your own. Each was grown from a
unique seed, pregnant with unique natural laws, that bring about
~ 10 ~
~ 11 ~
but those tiny changes are like seeds, and cause effects that
themselves become causes, and so the causal ripples go radiating
out through the universal web of ten trillion intertwined stories,
until trifling causes have blossomed into potent effects, that
bring our inexorable plans to fruition. We have toppled ancient
empires, and decided the fates of worlds, by setting in motion
causal chains that began with events of no more seeming
significance than the beating of a butterfly's wing although
that is not to say that we cherish the universe's smaller stories
any less than the epic narratives of history.
Today we implanted in you a series of hypnotic suggestions,
that will trigger certain behaviours in you, in response to specific
stimuli. You will not recognise those behaviours, even as you
enact them it will seem to you that they are motivated
entirely by your own volition. Those pre-programmed
behaviours will have no consequences for your own life's story,
and are designed to exert their influence solely upon narratives
that will only momentarily and tangentially impinge upon your
own in this way setting in motion chains of events that will
follow crooked but carefully calculated paths through the
cosmic labyrinths of interwoven stories that surround you, until
they arrive at the curious destinations of our choosing.
Such is the seed we have planted in you it lies dormant,
now, awaiting the conditions of its germination. Return, then, to
living your narrative although you will never comprehend its
significance, it is by no means an insignificant story.
~ 12 ~
~ 13 ~
~ 14 ~
pairing? If Adam is Buzz and Eve is Neil, was there a third? Did
a threesome build a world? I suppose not.
Oh god, I wish these chems would get out of my blood.
Theyre out of yours. I can see. Youre sat on that rock in the
suit that makes you look like Buck Rogers (was that the third
guy, no, no it wasnt), and youve turned on all the halogens in
the edges of the suit in the headset, the wrists, even the soles
of your feet and like some burning angel you sit and ponder
where the fuck we are. You look sad, sweetheart. But are you
sad with me? I cant tell. I think youre sad this sky is not the
one planned.
Im trying to tell you what happened so I can remember, you
do get that right? Im not being stupid, am I? Were in this
together. You put me in the suit as unceremoniously as they put
me in the tank. I put you down on that rock to think whilst I
vomit in this tube in my suit to get the chems out of me. Im
warming up to actual body-temp now, and that makes me kind
of happy. I think, soon, well be able to talk like we used to. In
the Garden. Our Eden. On Earth. Before we have to go out
there and become Adam & Eve & that other guy.
We need to find out where we are? When we are? You ask,
part question, part answer, part spectator sport for the unholy
fucking gods of this part of the cosmos. The sky is made from
quasars. We head back to the ship to consult the onboard A.I. I
think we named him Stan, after Kubrick. Arent we a bunch of
comedians.
CANT SAY WHERE YOU ARE, SORRY GUYS! Stan is cheery.
If he was a person hed be a gameshow host, and we put him in
charge of repopulation triremes in the depths of space. Arent
we a bunch of comedians Mark II.
And when? You seem more despondent than me, but I
aint saying much still, truth be told, thinking about how we
should have had a bigger ceremony for setting off like this and
~ 15 ~
~ 16 ~
Wait a second.
AFRAID I CANT WAIT A SECOND, OR YOULL BE WAITING
EVEN LONGER. It even laughed. Someone had programmed
laughter into the damn thing.
So you know the date, but because you show it through this
spinning date-clock animation, itll take too long to show it.
The computer blinked a yes.
Itll take twenty years
YEP! FRAID SHOW CHAPETTE. FRAID SO. IN TWENTY
YEARS MY ANIMATION FINISHES AND YOU SEE WHEN YOU AT!
It had just reached the year 245,612,345,709. By the time I
finished reading the number, to you, my sweetheart, it had
reached the three-hundred billions. Still going. I remember when
we left the ship it was still going. I kind of wanted to see it end.
But I cant wait twenty years. I have no idea what my life
expectancy is. Apparently that was the piss of the century, and a
few more besides.
~
Something had happened to Stan. We asked him what but he
got all sheepish. We asked him to show anything he had seen I
~ 17 ~
mean, as much as a ship can see, its all infrared sensors and
pocket-viewers and other some-such new-fangled crap and
after a lot of coaxing, like asking a scared child to touch the
dolly in the places the bad man had touched you, it eventually
unravelled a piece of video. It was mostly purple light, flashing
out of something with a biological shape. Said it was the depths
of space though, or so did the coordinates; looked like Stan was
having a breakdown. Seeing things. Or something the shape of a
skull-jellyfish-god had glowed over the stern, the bow, the heart
of our ship and sent us so off course into a future beyond the
future. Well, fuck. Couldnt make this shit up. I wanted another
coffee, but we were walking across the surface of a dead world.
The last thing Stan had told us was to be careful out there, and
that he probably dropped us off on this heap of rock for a
reason. Stan had begun to cry. I knew then never to trust a
computer programmer again.
Youre still sad sweetheart but I can tell not because of the
situation. Im beyond those kinds of feelings. Im just watching
the flares of dead stars in the sky, and how it bounces off the
onyx and obsidian in the rock formations around us. I quite
liked being a geologist. You quite liked linguistics. Proper Star
Trek pairing. This hunk of rock sure is pretty. Like you. I should
never have slept with that girl. It was because she was blonde.
So we traverse the end of the world and Im trying to talk to
you but you wont answer, and to be fair I aint saying anything.
How can I? What is there to say? I cant really ask how the flight
went, as it was the most boring, semi-conscious ride of my
lifetime. Lasted hours. Thats when I knew it had gone wrong.
They say you are asleep in cryo, and thats bullshit. Youre awake
but super slowed down. A century feels like five minutes. And it
felt like hours on that journey. With just me and my infidelity
for company. I couldnt even turn my head to look at you, see if
you were awake like I was awake, or if you had found a way to
sleep in the ice. We were prehistoric.
~ 18 ~
We pass this chasm and walk over this little hillock and the
ground is crunching and all of a sudden I think I see something.
I point it out to you.
I see it too. You say, dead-pan as ever. I dont reply. I just
head towards it. A kind of light, but like something shining off
something. Like the sun off a razorblade. Like a torch off a
mirror. Stan was right; he had crash-landed here for a reason.
Good ol Stan. Could never say a bad word about him Sorry,
ok, am I not allowed to be delirious too?
We stop on a ridge and I turn to you and I nearly tell you.
You look at me and I realise you have been waiting for me to
tell you. I realise you already know. You already know how
much of a prick I am. So I dont tell you. I cant give you that
satisfaction. But I can give you the shimmer of light at the end
of the world, so I help you down, and youre thankful.
~
It takes a few hours. Thankful the suits are filled with
nutrient-packets, the kind that dissolve against the skin when
you need them. My body is buzzing with energy. Ive never felt
this good. Comes with only taking vitamins through a protective
spacesuit, and not by eating a burger. I wish Id never had that
BBQ.
Wed have been stunned at the sight if we werent exhausted.
But our blood was filled with vitapacks, and our minds were
filled with dreams-we-had-awake, and so the sight of this
floating factory didnt much do anything for us. It was shaped
like an enormous flower, something like a lotus or some other
plant. And made of a metal I couldnt identify with sight. But it
shimmered. It reflected the lights of dying stars off its shell just
perfectly. Near 100%. Light out of light out of light. It
undulated on the edges and curled inwards in the middle, like
some tesseract I studied them in high school, when we first
~ 19 ~
~ 20 ~
many limbs I want to say like arms but they werent anything
like any limb I had seen before towards the factory.
We stood, the three of us, under the undulating flower. And
a sphincter opened at its base. I assumed wed float, or
something would come down, like a ladder, but then we were
just inside like we had always been inside. I sometimes, even
now, consider the possibility that I have been nowhere else in
the whole universe apart from inside this flower. I could see the
figure that had found us more clearly now. It had no feet to
walk on, and seemed to just hover precisely where it needed to
be. It didnt float around, or walk, itd just appear somewhere
else, like it had always been there, in the same way I have always
been in the flower yet I have been outside it it just is what it
is, lets keep it at that. This shimmering angelic thing without
wings, but with hundreds of limbs not arms, with billions of
threaded tendrils of light like hair on a newborn. I felt newborn.
I turned to you to tell you but you just werent there. I worry
you have never been there. I worry I dont have a name. Id tell
you my name the next time we meet, if we ever meet.
I turned to the figure, still not scared, and asked where my
wife had gone. It didnt tell me, it just motioned upwards for me
to look. It was truly a factory, a kind of cosmic plant. Thousands
of conveyor belts churned thousands of things around. Some of
the belts were invisible, merely currents of pressure lifting and
moving the things between rooms I couldnt comprehend. Some
were metallic. Others glass. One seemed to be made of moss.
On each conveyor, anything from rocks to tiny people. The
people were all asleep and curled like foetuses. But some were
not foetal. Some were. Some were very young indeed. I realised
some of them were merely cells and that, somehow, I could see
them from miles down at the base of the factory. The rest were
enormous, blue whale-like leviathans, elephantine behemoths.
~ 21 ~
~ 22 ~
responsible for it. And then it would cry, and vanish. These long
vanishings were a hunt, to find more of me, more of my wife.
And it always came back with no one. It was only when I was an
old man, and the creature began to die when I began to die
with the infinite creatures rotating through the folds of a flower,
a plant, at the end of time that I realised it knew as much as I.
It was my guide, and it was a caretaker. It dusted the floors of
the factory. Ulysses gardened. They froze. It hired the people for
the factory. And it thought I was its labourer.
I cackled once, a corpse in the last human achievement,
remembering, somewhere, Stan had finished working out what
year it was.
~ 23 ~
~ 24 ~
~ 25 ~
duvet off the bed, as a magician would whip a table cloth from
under a full dinner set. I'm left clutching the wet sheets and
there is my wife's body exposed on the mattress. Her
discoloured underwear and t-shirt seem to hang off of her small
form. She looks like she has the bones of a bird and I wonder
when she became so thin. Tiny bird.
There's vomit in her hair. Oh god, that's what the rest of the
smell is. Lucy, Lucy, you fucking drunk. I go into the en suite
bathroom and start running a bath. When I come back through
to the bedroom it seems different, as if someone has reshuffled
all of the furniture a few inches to the left. I'm looking at it from
her side. I am half way to the bed when I realise that the
furniture has not moved, in fact nothing has moved. Lucy has
not moved.
My wife is not breathing.
Cop mode comes on like a primordial instinct. I drag the wet
hair out of her face to get to her mouth. I check her pulse and it
is absent. She is cold; she is Sunday morning church cold.
I peel back her eye-lids and the pupils are fixed, glassy. The
blue of her irises are filmy, already changing to a paler shade. I
let her head go and sit on the floor. Her body is all wrong,
discolouring, wilting, decaying. She's been dead for hours. She's
frozen in sleep, a souvenir.
I hear pizzicato strings of music playing from the stereo of a
car outside. The Doppler Effect pulls it away, out into the
morning sun somewhere, and I am left in the stale silence of the
room.
The static of bath water filling the tub breaks the vigil of
what is now a crime scene.
Oh Lucy, what did you do?
I stand and pull her from the bed. She is marble and my
shoulder twinges again. Even with so much fluid drained out of
her already minute form, she is concrete.
The dead are always heavier than the living.
I carry her into the bathroom and, without much grace,
lower her into the bath tub. I shut off the taps and she drifts
~ 26 ~
there, suspended by the water. I pull her soiled clothes off her,
which is harder to do than anything I'd like to be doing at this
time on a Tuesday morning. I toss them in the hamper with
mine and sit down on the floor. Fuck.
I light a cigarette and watch the smoke pirouette under the
light. Everything smells terrible and I fight back the urge to
vomit in order not to add to it. Fuck.
I peer over the edge of the tub and gaze upon the permanent
expression of my dead wife's face. I'm just glad her eyes are
shut. I don't want her to look at me right now. I know I should
call an ambulance; I should have called one ten minutes ago, as
soon as I pressed my fingers to her arteries and found them
stagnant. But it seems so, pointless?
Like an afterthought. I know she's dead. What can they
possibly do for either of us?
I knock cigarette ash onto the floor and take my own pulse.
Perfectly steady. Cop trick. We're hard-wired that way.
I'm fine, but this is not.
God damn it Lucy, this was supposed to be my day off.
I run the nail of my thumb under my jaw and it feels like the
sharp side of a match-book. I need to shave, but standing in
front of the mirror over the sink means turning my back to her.
I have the uncomfortable feeling that she might sit up and wrap
her stiff white hands around my throat as soon as I glance away.
She'd have liked to have wrapped her hands around my throat
when she was still living, though she never did, but now she has
nothing to lose.
I wonder exactly how inappropriate it would be if I went
downstairs and made coffee.
Before I can reach a conclusion to that thought the door-bell
chimes and the house is filled with a strangled electronic
polyphony.
Oh boy.
I get up and wander out of the bathroom. I leave the door
open behind me; it's not as if she's going anywhere.
~ 27 ~
~ 28 ~
Yeah
There goes my day off.
I'm guessing that wound on your head isn't from a bar
fight?
I wish it was, at least then I could have had a drink
I pad through to the lounge and open the glass side-cabinet.
I take out two high-ballers and a bottle of Jamesons.
I down two fingers before I pour us both a half-glass
measure. We stand there sipping whiskey like it's a dinner party.
I should have never gotten out of bed today.
I look at her and she seems younger than I remember, even
with the stitches and the dirt. She looks like somebody loved her
once. Took her to parks when she was a kid, read her bedtime
stories, flipped pancakes with her for Shrove Tuesday. She looks
like somebodies kid and my stomach burns. God damn it.
I gesture for her to take a seat. I go through to the kitchen
and pull a bag of peas out of the freezer. I wrap them in a towel
and toss them onto Ada's lap.
For your head
Thanks
I light another cigarette and sit down on the edge of the
coffee table. Her jeans are torn on one calf and I can see the
slender flesh of her leg, paler than the rest. I wonder if only her
hands and face are dirty, if the rest is polished clean, several
shades lighter. I wonder what she does when she's not getting
herself into these clusterfuck nightmares.
Ada, do you ever go to the movies?
What?
Nothing
I get up and open the patio doors out into the conservatory,
which is less a conservatory and more a self-contained botanical
garden. The sunlight here is transformed into the eternal warm
light of better memories. This was Lucy's room of the house.
Expensive plants I don't know the name of cover every surface.
The colours hurt my eyes, every flower is a part of Lucy. Red
bursts like fits of blood, long-stemmed flowers the pale colour
~ 29 ~
of her dead skin, neat blue blossoms the shade of her fixed eyes.
I stand there and feel as though my dead wife is looking right
back at me.
Ada appears behind me and huffs.
Well isn't this pretty. Middle class people have such nice
shit
It was my wife's. She liked gardening better than she liked
me
Cry me a river
In the middle of the blooms stands a bird cage like structure,
suspended on hooks. It's covered with a cloth but I can hear the
movement inside. I tug the sheet off and reveal a closure of
butterflies. Ada coos like a child at the zoo.
Inside are at least 30 or 40 butterflies. A breathing, living,
shuddering, chaos of wings. I don't know what any of them are,
with the exception of the regal looking ones, those are red
admirals. My mother used to have them in her garden every
summer.
Ada downs the last of her scotch and leaves the glass on the
only available surface. She approaches the enclosure with
tentative apprehension, as if she may frighten them away with
her rude appearance.
What kind of broad keeps butterflies?
She's whispering and I want to laugh. Do butterflies have
ears? Are they deaf to the world? I don't know.
I lift a vase of flowers Lucy had been working on yesterday.
An arrangement of dark lilac shades and congealed crimsons. I
hand it to Ada.
Take these
I lean past her and lift the enclosure from its hooks. Ada's
eyes follow it with reverence.
Definitely somebodies kid.
I hold it against me with both hands. The movement within
sends tremors down my rib cage and I think of entering Lucy. I
think of pushing her legs open and slipping inside of her,
disappearing. I think of keeping her until she disintegrates to
~ 30 ~
mush, would the smell turn me off of her flesh? Maybe not. I
think of cable tying her in any position I can imagine. I think of
the possibilities.
My wife is dead
Ada chokes on her own saliva.
I turn out of the conservatory, still carrying the butterfly
cage. I walk back through to the hall-way, Ada frantically
bobbing at my back.
What do you mean your wife is dead? Dead? As in dead
dead?
What other kind of dead is there?
I ascend the stairs. The cage swings like a monks incense
torch in front of me and the butterflies form weather patterns of
colour with my movement. I carry it into the bedroom and set it
down on the bed. The bottom sheet is still stained. The last
remains of Lucy. Spilled fluids evacuated from her form at the
moment of departure.
What is the fucking smell?
I hear Ada choking behind me. I guess it's worse than I
thought.
Come with me
I lead her into the bathroom and enter once more into the
scene of my abstract sentimentality.
Ada holds the sleeve of her jacket over her face to feign off
the scent.
She appears at my side and there is a jerk of sound from her
bruised lips.
Fuck. Fuck. Oh my god. Is that? Jesus fucking Christ
It is
You have to call someone. What the fuck. You have to call
someone
I take the vase from Ada's hands and set it on the counter. I
begin pulling out the flowers and snapping the heads from the
stalks. I toss each flower into the bath tub. They land on Lucy
like confetti at a church service. The sound is faint gun fire.
~ 31 ~
~ 32 ~
~ 33 ~
~ 34 ~
A FORMER VERSION OF THIS POEM WAS PUBLISHED ON UUT POETRY, JUL. 3 2011
~ 35 ~
2011
~ 36 ~
FLORIFEROUS PEDICELS
1
Behold these plants!
doing my favorite thing
pointing up:
asparagus sprouting
from the armpits of
collapsing justice.
2
He guided his blade with a whoosh
jabbing crates of diagonal stars
that had been hiding behind millet bread
like inattentive children
on an island of disjointed light.
3
What is the banana?
A speeding car.
What are apples?
The shaved heads of young men.
What is inside the heart of the redwood forest?
A crumpled tissue.
What, truly, is a twig?
King Arthur's snot.
What are taproots?
Mosquitoes sucking the dark blood of history.
~ 37 ~
4
Hold your straw with two fingers
churn your mushy frappuccino
look deeply into his eyes
and say autumn.
~ 38 ~
~ 39 ~
~ 40 ~
I lost the voice after the speech and when I called again no
one answered.
I got lost in the atmosphere and the muttering I could hear
across the room for the next while, and I couldn't tell you how
many days went past.
"Hello there my loverly." A blinding light appeared above me
and this object moved forward to grab me. I had nowhere to go.
Trapped. I shut my eyes and waited for the end.
It didn't come. I opened my eyes slowly after a few seconds
and realised what had happened. It was a person, a real live
person. I was far from the ground so the person must be tall.
Most importantly there was air up here, and sunlight!!
"Sorry I didn't come and get you sooner petal but you need
some time to get some growing on ya."
Most of this was gibberish to me: all I care is that he came.
Although I felt that green place was killing me, maybe it did me
some good. My body and arms all seemed really strong or
maybe that was the fresh air that's revived me a bit.
"I've gotta put you back for a few days." My mood wilted a
little. "Don't worry though flower, Ill sort you out."
When I got back in, the air had cleared the wet-th a little and
I could see my surroundings all of a sudden.
"Lucky." The voice from the other day returned and this
time I could see a withered figure to match the drawl.
~ 41 ~
"Sorry. Did I break the rules? You said about rules the other
day?"
"Nah kid I was jus' trying ta scare ya." He chucked and
smiled to himself.
It definitely wasn't funny.
"We are in the orphanage, some of us get chosen. Some of
us never leave," he said in an ominous tone
"Get chosen? What? All you seem to do is speak in rhyme"
"Not really if you want to talk about rhyming wildlife, read
Alice in Wonderland"
"WHAT?" At this point I was pretty frustrated.
"Fine, okay. Kid, one day a family will come to choose you
so you get out of this green nightmare. The nice man upstairs
takes us out to be chosen." And with that exasperated tone the
withered one turned away.
That night I tossed and turned thinking about what it meant
to live a life like this and I chose to change it.
I woke up and the man appeared in the burning light above.
"Its your turn little-un." The nice man said.
He chose me and a couple of the others and stacked us into
this rickety old car and I headed to my destiny.
Some family isn't going to choose me.
~ 42 ~
~ 43 ~
~ 44 ~
ROBOTS PAINTBRUSH
AN INTERVIEW with ANTHONY PRESTIA / @GREATARTBOT
~ 45 ~
~ 46 ~
How did you get into the creation of twitter bots? How do
you decide what you want them to do? (Which is trying to
ask where do you get your ideas from without saying it in
quite such a frustrating way.)
Twitter bots were a direct result of my interest in systems. I
think social networks, Twitter in particular, are fascinating
systems. Twitter is this place where people interact with one
another, with brands and with bots on a daily basis. Its really
sort of bizarre when you take a step back and look at it. When I
started making Twitter bots, I wanted to explore those
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