Frankenstein Revisited

http://www.algolit.net/frankenstein/

Download the book:
http://www.algolit.net/frankenstein/ressources/publication/entire-frankie.pdf
Download the material: http://www.algolit.net/frankenstein/ressources/frankie_the_publication_sources.zip
Download the scripts of the bots: http://www.algolit.net/frankenstein/ressources/frankensteinbots.zip
Create your own PJ-machine: https://github.com/sarahgarcin/pj-machine

Artificial intelligence can be as complex as it can be simple. Exactly 200 years after Mary Shelly’s publication of ’Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus’, on the invitation of Roland Fischer, curator of Mad Scientist, a yearly festival in Bern, a small group of Python lovers started working on literary chatbots based on or inspired by this gothic novel.
They engaged in the conversation around artificial intelligence by sharing ideas, works and reflections about the topic reframed in the dispositive of the novel: they talked about Frankenstein the text, the inventor and the monster. Using one of the oldest chat protocols (IRC) they created bots and went into dialogue with them, discovered their reactions, scrutinized their feelings during the interaction.
During the Mad Scientist Festival in Bern, they organised a workspace amongst the stuffed animals inside the Natural History Museum for a booksprint of 3 days. They produced a new Frankenstein, a publication in which the interaction between text, humans and machines is not fictional content but the result of a collective process executed using the PJ Machine, a ’publishing jockey machine’ with arcade buttons.

With contributions by: Piero Bisello (art historian & writer), Sarah Garcin (graphic designer and programmer), James Bryan Graves (computer scientist), Anne Laforet (artist & critic), Catherine Lenoble (writer) and An Mertens (artist & writer).