My love story with Spambot.
This little robot breaths and shows emotions, like other “tamagotchi” like digital age creatures, except that Spambot has a few limitations that add to it’s personality: it can only survive if it is fed spam. We, the humans, cannot feed or interact with Spambot. Only his peers, the internet crawling spambots, can feed him and help him live. We therefore are faced with a loss of control of our technological surrounding, and a fear that Spambot might die.

This project embodies many of the themes I have been exploring this year; communications in a networked world, interaction and genetics. Unlike my previous projects, though, Spambot is not about bringing people closer together. The interaction with this project is on a different plane: You want to see Spambot live, but you cannot feed him, like you would do for a pet. You are powerless as to what his future is going to be and it is equally sad and fascinating to me. But this isn’t the only thing about Spambot that sets him apart from the crowd, the fact that he “feeds” off spam, and even posts what they are saying on his website, shows his disconnection from human interaction.

How it works
Physically, the bot is composed of recycled cardboard, LEDs, an Arduino, a continuous rotation motor, a hand-made custom gear and dental floss (yes). The body of the bot was made with origami techniques to give the movement a very smooth and organic feel, which contrasts with the motor, the Spambot involvement and all the programming facettes.

On the programming side, I’ve created an unprotected form online for spam to take the bait. Once values are submitted, my code first parses to determine if it is a spambot or a human, then, if all requirements are met, the date when the text was inputted and the message itself are added to a database. Then there is the index page, which only displays the database and project information, and the XML auto-refresh page, that calculates with dates whether the Spambot is dead or alive. That same page also, like the name implies, generates an xml file every 5 seconds with updated information from the server.

Then I used Processing to connect to the xml file, do a few calculations and then tell Arduino what to do. I use xml connection with Processing, instead of direct MySQL connection because it is much faster and simpler to do so. When Arduino receives the information from Processing, it calculates how bright the LEDs should be and if the motor should be running.

Photos and video coming soon

Spambot is an organism that can only survive if fed from other bots. When it receives spam, it feeds from it and survives, but when it goes a little while without attention from it’s internet brothers, it grows weak and might die.

With this project, I am using something that not a lot of people are very fond of: Spam. We are growing weary of those internet entities that fill our email boxes with poetic messages about nigerian wealth and cheap viagra. After all, spam is useless, and can be the “Cheval de Troi” that puts us in a lot of trouble. But what if bots were used for good? What if they could affect our physical world in a peaceful and pleasant way?

Spambot is somewhat of a satire of this gardening trend going around on the internet of late. People have been using physical computing methods to take care of plants or animals. I think the idea of feeding a plant via Twitter is as ridiculous as feeding a robot via spam.

How it works
The first part of this project was to create a clever trap for spam. Therefore, I created a simple webpage with a form to fool the bots at http://www.iheartpigeons.com/projects/spambot/manage.php where they can do their thing. Before inserting the submitted form to a database, it is first parsed to see whether or not it originates from a bot. This was made by querying the message string for links, as bots really like links, and returning a true or false statement.

Making my trap a cozy bot nest wasn’t that easy. I had to submit the webpage to multiple directories which was long and boring, but all worth the effort.

(more information to come)

For this project we had to visually represent information inside a database. Just “googling” the words visual data on the web can get you tons of similar projects with nifty graphics and fancy designs. To me, all these data representations are trends. You get the circle-type designs, the bar graphs, the illustrations, and so on, but do these have any leverage anymore? I wanted to approach the project in a different manner, therefore I did a lot of research into physical computing.

My project is about communications. At first I wanted to integrate cellphone technology in the piece, but instead I took a simpler method to make my message come across. How Are You Feeling is a very simple piece, from a form on a webpage people select whether they are happy or sad. Depending on the global answers of people, cups with lights inside them turn red or blue. The purpose of the project was to make an interactive piece for the class. It is completely anonymous, and from the color represented in the cups, the class can physically see what is the general mood inside the class. What was surprising about the presentation was that the cups went from red to blue constantly, showing that a lot of people in class are sad. This doesn’t come as obvious since when you ask someone how they are feeling, the polite answer is always “good”. How Are You Feeling, to me, had a very strong impact on me, and I hope it had a similar impact on others in class.

Technically, the project was quite complicated to accomplish. The page where users input their mood is made with PHP and radio buttons. It connects to MySQL and adds +1, either to sad or happy, to an integer value in the database. I also created a PHP page that generates from the database an XML file, updated every 5 seconds, to speed up my Processing code. If I coded my Processing sketch to directly connect to MySQL instead of XML, it would have slowed down the process by a lot, because every 120 frames it would have to reconnect to make the program real-time. When it connects to the XML document it just parses a file, so it is much faster. Since Processing takes values in XML documents as strings, I had to transform those into variables. Afterward, I compare them to find which one is highest, and then I send to an Arduino code, through a serial port, the information. If the Arduino code gets that Happy is higher than Sad, it will send a command to it’s physical board to light the red L.E.D and turn the , if it get’s the information that Sad is higher than Happy, it will tell Arduino to do the opposite.

I feel like the project has a lot of potential as a communication device. On a small scale, two people can have similar cups and they can share how they feel together without using words. On a bigger scale, the project could remain the same but with the cups being replicated a hundred times to have a stronger visual impact. I would also like to make it, instead of turning from red to blue, be a nuance of the colors. If 50% of the participants are sad, then the cups would light purple, if 75% of the participants are happy, then it would be a red-ish purple.

Ce texte de Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga traîte des limites et des effets secondaires relié à l’émergence des technologies telles que l’internet. Plus précisément, l’auteur aborde le sujet des bases de données. Dans un monde (Internet) ou tout es propriété publique, des artistes se sont associés pour mettre fin aux abus sur le web. Leurs tactiques ont comme buts, parmis tant d’autres, d’informer la masse et de renverser le pouvoir. Le net.art a proliféré dans cet environnement d’injustice et d’abus, et sert toujours comme activisme sur ce territoire ou les corporations veulent s’approprier notre identité ou surveiller nos moindres mouvements.

While browsing the web for inspiration for this project, I came across this text that said: “[...] mapping is more about representation than truthfulness[...]“. This made me wonder about the nature of maps and how they could become “real” representations.

Thus came the project “Montreal is…”. Cities are usually mapped according to their physical attributes (geological, transportation, etc.), while I find that what really represents a place is what the people make it out to be. But how do you map feelings of an individual, or of an entire population, without rendering everything to statistic and number?

I decided that the best way was to use the tools of social networking to my advantage. With the advent of sites like Twitter, it is easy to find out how people feel about certain things at a current time. “Montreal is…” makes use of this site and generates a “map” of Montreal according to a small number of people.

Technicalities: I used PHP to search the Twitter API and find the last few entries that mention: “montreal is”. Afterward, I created a code that checks keywords inside the results and, if a keyword is found, the background will change accordingly. For example, if someone mentions that Montreal is sunny, the image posted in the background should be of a sunny Montreal (unless the code finds more than one keyword in the results, in which case only the most recent post will be taken in account). I wanted to push the project a little further and use the Flickr API, but, alas, copyright and search relevance issues made it impossible. So, Instead, I decided to use a few images I had access to.

With more time to develop the project, I would like to calculate how many people have found Montreal “cold” or “beautiful” (and so on) within a time frame and display it. I would also like to make the images in the background more relevant and of better quality for the project.

Project page