Automated activists — Climate Bots
bachelor diploma, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts 2020
Find them all on http://b0ts4climate.glitch.me/
Starting from contemplating our agency as citizens and activists in face global cataclism, I moved towards the idea of automating our
protests.
protests.
I wanted to answer trolls created by PR agencies and political parties with social bot guerilla, software for positive social change and chatbots activily acting towards spreading awareness of climate crisis.
I learned Javascript and programmed 5 socialbots:
1. Crying Bot
2. Counting Bot
3. Forecasting Bot
4. Climate Info Bot
5. Protest Helper
1. Crying Bot
2. Counting Bot
3. Forecasting Bot
4. Climate Info Bot
5. Protest Helper
Crying Bot
Using data collected by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, this bot generates Twitter obituaries for species that are now completely extinct.
It’s main goal is to create a narrative of mourning around the currently undergoing 6th Mass Extinction.
Counting Bot
Using database of transactions and contracts signed by Polish Ministry of Environment, this bot generates simple visualizations of trees we could have planted for the same amount of money.
Each twit adds to the sum of all the trees, that could have been planted. With each image, the text becomes harder and harder to read. The contracts range from „Purchase of gasoline for business cars” to „Monitoring of the media”.
Forecasting Bot
World Bank provides this bot with a database of mathematical predictions about climate change. Each day of a month, this bot creates a forecast for the same month, but in the future.
Protest Helper
It’s a Facebook Messenger chatbot, that helps you to prepare for your first protest. But it will also guide you through the process of organizing your own demonstration ;)
Climate Info Bot
Similarly, it’s a chatbot. With a simple, conversation-like interface, the user can learn about scientific facts concerning climate crisis.
Designer-Coder
On a more metadesign level, this project was also about our skills as designers, our field of work and programming in general as a medium for design.
The visual aspects,especially mediated by the interface of popular social media portals may seem modest, however both texts and images were generated by code and I tried to give as much attention to the design of code as to the design of everything else.
Bots are written in Node.js, a runtime that lets me create a server using Javascript. The images are generated from the data collected through APIs by scripts written in Javascript using p5.js library. However probably the biggest obstacle for me was going through the bureaucracy associated with app development.
