Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 I <3 My Mother Bots : Archive, Corporeality and Écriture Matière
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This creative and eisegetical piece describes the birth of two Twitter bots whose voices emerge from the author’s late mother’s literary archive. Because the archive is locked in a storage cube overseas, the archival approach is speculative, experimental and under constraint. Performing a stocktake of physical artefacts that the author has access to in Melbourne, and drawing on memory as living archive, the author constructs a website around these archival objects by way of a clickable image map, inspired by Shelley Jackson’s (2006) hypertextual work my body – a Wunderkammer, and using techniques common to écriture féminine and écriture matière (Eades, 2015). When this does not satisfy the author’s archive fever (Derrida, 1995) she builds a poetry bot that tweets pseudorandomly generated poetry, and a second Twitter bot that responds to these poetics using lines from her mother’s unpublished manuscript. The author anthropomorphises her Mother Bots, explains how the Tracery library powers the bots’ code through expanding grammars, considers the ethics of posthumous tweeting, and concludes with an exploration of the chatbot field, including American Artist’s Sandy Speaks (2016) and Maartje Smits’s The Artist Is Not Present (2019), and considers the ephemerality of digital works.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon TEXT Special Issue Digital Realism no. 69 2022 25658613 2022 periodical issue 'The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a heavy reliance on digital technologies: workplaces and classrooms have retreated to Zoom meetings; online video game narratives and streaming services have become a staple of contemporary entertainment; and social media pervades our life and seeks to distract us at every turn. Existence is now infused with non-human computer language. Even contemporary print texts display what N.K. Hayles calls the “mark of the digital” (2008, p. 159). Hayles (2008) argues that contemporary literature is deeply
    interpenetrated by electronic textuality:

    digital technologies do more than mark the surfaces of contemporary print novels. They also put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language… More than a mode of material production (although it is that), digitality has become the textual condition of the twenty-first-century literature. (p. 186) (Publication abstract)

    2022
Last amended 17 Jan 2023 09:32:24
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