Chapter 5
MashBOT
Helen J. Burgess
MashBOT consists of a small thermal receipt printer connected to Twitter via an Arduino microcontroller. Love notes are generated using Markov chains from a corpus consisting of 90 lines from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments and ten from Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology. They are then published to the @mashomatic Twitter account and printed as “receipts” for display. MashBOT asks us to think about the ways in which the written declaration of love (the “mash note”) is a document at once transactional and unfathomable.
Figure 5.1. Love notes emerging from MashBOT’s thermal printer. Format: Love notes. Materials: Arduino, ethernet, thermal printer, breadboard components, and Twitter. Rutgers University-Camden Digital Studies Center, August 2015. Helen J. Burgess. Photograph by the artist.