Darius Kazemi, bot impresario
Darius Kazemi (@tinysubversions) is a Boston-based artist-programmer and founding member of the #botALLY community. His recent shift towards the strategic pursuit of small projects has led to an array of Twitter bots, as well as numerous artworks and experiments published to other platforms.
As Kazemi notes, “lots of projects means you can have something to pull out for pretty much any occasion.” The technical and conceptual diversity of his text- and image-manipulating bots is testament to this, from the lazy joke-making critique of @Amiritebot to the recombinant poetics of @TwoHeadlines and @YouNeverDidThe to the algorithmic autofandom of @AU_prompts and @wirescenes. Kazemi is also one of several botmakers and thinkers to be influenced by object-oriented ontology, most notably by way of Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology.
To sample the pleasures afforded by Kazemi’s oeuvre, there’s a bot for that: @dariusbots aggregates the most popular of his creations’ creations:
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In addition to his artistic output, Kazemi has advocated for and advanced both the practice of botmaking and its practitioners through writing, speaking, code (including corpora, a collection of small-scale test data sets, and wordfilter, for filtering “bad words” from bot output), and the convening of the annual Bot Summit, a community conference held in Boston and online to celebrate and discuss the state of the art.
