Code text and text-to-speech

Template:Events Workshop by An Mertens and Michael Murthaugh, Constant Association for Art and Media (BE).

Picture this: In 2084, after the decay of Google and the deprecation of the Web 2.0 darknet, the web is reconstructed using the sustainable IRC protocol. In place of the burned-out centralized data centers created at the turn of the century, software in this new network is deployed as lightweight interogable bots in ad-hoc mesh networks and are rewritten and mutated as needed. Different bots crawl the different archives (archive.org, wikipedia, google, gitorious) and publish parts of conversation in different spaces (etherpad, wiki, print, epub). The result is a social space for writing (software, fiction, documentation) and file-sharing where software and services are as verbose as the participants.

After launching this idea during Relearn in Brussels in 2014, the project of a botnet has grown into a space for bot seances, in which we summon dead authors to interact via their works, the originals as much as the remixes. While developing the architecture and creating the first bots for Public Domain Day 2015 - Bots Waller, Rachmanibot, NICK Tesla and Beatrix Botter - we realized the platform is great for learning how to read and write text with code. For this workshop a basic knowledge of programming came in handy. For those familiar to Python An and Michael proposed to develop chatbots that can translate text-to-speech so we could give each of the AI personalities a personal voice. Using Free Software & Free Art Licenses only.