Allison Parrish / Chapbooks & Smiling Face Withface

As part of The Art of Bots showcase, Allison Parrish presented smiling face withface and a series of her generative poetry chapbooks.

Project Intro:

smiling face withface is a bot that speculates on the purpose and shape of the Internet’s most widespread system of symbols: emoji. Using Twitter’s open-source twemoji project as a starting point, the bot’s code introduces random errors to the vector data of emoji characters, re-shaping and recombining them into glitchy forms that are simultaneously foreign and familiar. The resulting images are combined with procedurally-generated titles (designed to mimic the language of Unicode character names) and then posted to Tumblr.

For The Art of Bots Allison also made limited edition chapbooks based on the output of a number of her online generative poetry bots. She made 25 editions of each of the following; The Ephemerides, Deep Question Bot and Our Arrival, which were available to buy during the event.

Artist Bio:

Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer who lives in Brooklyn. Her teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She holds a masters degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications program and BA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley. Allison’s recent book, “@Everyword: The Book” (Instar Books, 2015), collects every tweet from @everyword, a Twitter bot she made that tweeted every word in the English language over the course of seven years—attracting over 100,000 followers along the way.

Allison has held fellowships and residencies with the Processing Foundation, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, and Recurse Center in New York City. She has been invited to present and speak about work at such venues as Eyeo, ProcJam, OSCON, PyGotham and IndieCade East. Allison is currently the Digital Creative Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University and an adjunct professor at ITP, where she teaches a course on writing computer programs that generate poetry.