bot in the woods by cymatiste
Presented at Vector Festival 2019
A Twitter bot that ran from 2018 to 2022, tweeting 9-second GIFs every 200 minutes depicting a stroll through an imaginary 3D woodland.
The decision to create the bot was Inspired by my love of walking through the Toronto ravines, and a desire to provide myself and others a brief escape into nature... in the middle of scrolling our timelines. Especially when we were all stuck at home during the pandemic, it was nice to have a periodic invitation to imagine we were out among the trees.
The bot received a lot of love on Twitter and in 2019, 4000 GIFs it created were projected in a video loop onto the windows of the InterAccess gallery as part of Vector Festival.
Each forested scene is a random variation produced by the same underlying code (written using threejs and running on node). Some are soaring and leafy; some are stumpy and twisted; some forests are
dense; some sparse; some are day scenes and some take place at night. Randomized colours deviate from the natural into a surreal rainbow palette that feels appropriate to the lowpoly digital aesthetic of a world that is, after all, being imagined by a robot.
Sometimes bugs and rendering glitches produced unexpected effects and sometimes I leaned into them to create more variations for the algorithm, but ultimately it always travelled its own path, surprising and delighting me and the bot's followers with its explorations of the possibility space.