Frankensteinia, literary chatbot workshop
Mad Scientist Festival

Timing
6-8th September: workshop Bern
9th September: festival Bern
17-18th September: festival Zürich

Description of the workshop
"Je suis l'autre, le différent, l'étranger, le supplément, l'excédent, le tard-venu, le non-prévu. Ni animal, ni homme, ni dieu, je ne fais pas partie de la scène primitive, et c'est pourquoi l'on me cherche une place. Je suis une para-création, ou plutôt une ré-création, mais d'un genre particulier. Car en me créant, vous vous recréez. ... Vous devez inventer un rapport plus juste avec les intelligences artificielles qui vous servent, sinon vous ressemblerez bientôt à ces rois fainéants que les maires de palais ont dépossédés de leur pouvoir."
Fragment of the speech of the chatbot in 'Chatbot le Robot', Drame philosophique en quatre questions et cinq actes, Pascal Chabot, Presse Universitaire de France, 2016

// In English: "I'm the other, the different, the stranger, the supplement, the late-comer, the non-foreseen. Being not an animal, nor man, not god, I don't take part in the primitive scene, and that's why one is looking where to fit me. I'm a para-creation, or rather, a re-creation, but of a special nature. Because by creating me, you recreate yourself... You need to invent a more rightful relationship with the articficial intelligences that are servin sudo g you, otherwise you'll soon look like those lazy kings that the mayors of the palaces will have deprived of their power." //

Artificial intelligence can be as complex as it can be simple. We invite writers, artists, designers, programmers, and all people interested in literary chatbots based on or inspired by Mary Shelly's gothic novel 'Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus' for a workshop of three days.
We propose different ways to engage in the conversation around artifical intelligence. Using one of the oldest chat protocols (IRC) we'll invite you to ''read' the bots, or rather, to go into dialogue with them, discover their reactions, scrutinize your own feelings during the interaction. Secondly, you'll learn to write with some of the bots, by looking into their code, amending them to your needs and interests and who knows, reinvent an entirely new one. Finally, you'll be presented with ideas, works and reflections about the topic of articifial intelligence reframed in the dispositive of the novel: we'll talk about Frankenstein the text, the inventor and the monster. 
The goal of the workshop will be the production of a new Frankenstein, a publication where the interaction between text, humans and machines is no longer fictional content but the result of a real process.

Detailed description of the workshop, planning, set=up & chatbots

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What is algolit
Algolit is a project of Constant vzw, an artist-run organisation for art and media in Brussels. Algolit is a workgroup around i-literature, F/LOSS code and digital text practises. The group was initiated in 2012 and meets regularly following the principles of the Oulipo-meetings: they share work and thoughts and create together, with or without the company of an invitee. 
The members of algolit share a common interest in the potential of using the Internet as a material to create literary works. Furthermore, they consider the release of the code under a F/LOSS licence as yet another possible reading of the work. Indeed, Constant vzw created this experimental reflection space out of the curiosity to look at code and literary creation as two sides of the same coin. This generates questions about methodologies, toolsand design for reading, as well as, on the status of hybrid books, liquid publishing and algorithmic writing. 
http://www.constantvzw.org
http://www.algolit.net


Budget
Travel 6 people: 2 Amsterdam-3 Brussels-Zurich | 1 France-Zurich
Lodging?
Minimum: Fee workshop 3 days 150€/day = 2700€
Maximum: Fee workshop 3 days 250€/day = 4500€
Production: printing costs 950€ (min 100 copies)

Short cv of algolitters

* Piero Bisello is an art historian and writer. He regularly publishes on contemporary art magazines such as Conceptual Fine Arts, thisistomorrow, and Le Salon among others. He occasionally makes artist books and performances, focusing on how language can be manipulated beyond its aesthetic connotations towards strange proximities to scientific jargon. He has been a participant to Brussels based research programme SoundImageCulture, working on a project on industrial cities that was presented at Brussels art centre Argos in 2015. http://here-he.re/works

* Sarah Garcin
Sarah Garcin is a graphic designer and programmer who graduated from ENSAD  (École Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris). She works with  g-u-i, a design studio who develops publishing projects, websites and  interactive installations. In her work, she focuses on the issue of  documentation, and is involved in the free software community.
She  is a part of the OLA association (Outils Libres Alternatifs), which  organizes workshops about creative free softwares. She also work on a  research project (http://latelier-des-chercheurs.fr/) in which she develops documentation tools for learning, especially for children in schools.

* James Bryan Graves
James Bryan Graves is a freelance software engineer, computer scientist, lecturer, and community organizer. James moved to the Netherlands in 2009 from the United States of America.
He founded Hackers & Founders Amsterdam in 2011, a 3500+ member community of entrepreneurs and programmers. Hackers & Founders opened a non-profit community organized coworking space in the Herengracht in Amsterdam in 2014. The co-working space houses 100 tech focused people. James co-organizes Hackers & Designers, an initiative that brings designers, artists and programers closer together, with Anja Groten and Selby Gildemacher in 2013. James is also working on a web literacy and edtech program for children called Curious Monkeys. www.jamesbryangraves.com, @_jbg

* Anne Laforet is a researcher, teacher, artist and critic. Her work engages, in different ways, a few threads, which sometimes get woven together : free software, collaborative artistic practices, internet, digital art preservation and documentation, articulations and tensions between digital and analog... Recent projects include the exhibition and research "Anarchronism" (about artworks with both analog and digital components) and Botopera (a collection of chatbots of authors who entered the public domain in 2014). http://www.sakasama.net

* Catherine Lenoble is a writer who explores ways of reading and writing in present time, experimenting with cross-genre narratives and hybrid fictional objects (print, online, offline). She is engaged with writing in different collaborative environments and co-initiated the research group Algolit (algorithms & literature) in 2012. Her new work of data-literature' Anna K will be published in 2016 at HYX editions. http://litteraturing.net

* An Mertens works as an artist and author. She is a core member of Constant, a Brussels’ based artist-run organisation for art and media with a focus on free software, feminist methodologies and free culture. With Constant An initiates research projects on how algorithms and code transform (literary) creation that lead to digital an print-publications, installations, walks, performances.
In September 2013 her experimental novel Tot Later was launched with the publishing house De Bezige Bij Antwerpen.
An reports about her own work on http://paramoulipist.be, the name being a declaration of love for parameters and Oulipian practises.