Helen Chen
DESIGN
MeTrA
WEB ART Slowing Down to Grow
Living History
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Note: Due to changes to Twitter/X’s policy on automated bots, this project no longer exists on Twitter/X.
An inquiry into how we can seamlessly embed our personal histories into our every day lives.
How do we maintain personal archives in the information age?
Living History is an inquiry into how we can more seamlessly and painlessly embed our personal histories into our every day lives, without having to depend on a separate, corporate entity to archive those histories digitally. It is also an invitation for others to be more open with archiving our personal, digital histories, as many millenials/gen z people tend to delete old posts out of embarrassment.
Every day, the @livinghistory5 Twitter account will randomly output one entry from my iPhone Notes app, a place where I jot down scraps of information from my life – personal, political, professional, or just meaningless dribble. I have over 1,000 notes, accumulated since September 2016 to the present day. For this bot, I chose to only center my tweets around the notes I took during 3 pivotal months of my life – July 2017, November 2017, and February 2018.
A viewer can also choose to tweet at the bot to read entries from specific months as replies, as stated in the Twitter bio.
(Created using cheapbotsdonequick.com, a bot creation platform that uses the Tracery generative text language, born out of Javascript and JSON)