Creating a Fortune Telling Word Engine

Making an automaton speak random slices of people's tweets is one thing, making them approximate to a reasonably grammatic or intelligible phrase is quite another. It struck me the key to this is looking at the extent of structured and classification that may (or not!) exist within tweets. This is actually fairly simple. Although there are not many of them, there are grammar rules used on Twitter that are generally used in a consistent way.  There is a community etiquette that monitors and maintains these standards. The most important are listed below, with some indication of how this meaning might be used

• @username - any word with an @ in front of it is very specifically a twitter username. E.g. @rosemarybeetle This is easy peasy. If a @username is featured, the person is either being discussed or directly alerted/invited to contribute. These could be separated out to give a list people involved in the discussion somehow - very handy!

• #hashtag - this is twitter grammar for a topic of conversation. Once adopted a hashtag is intended to be used for only one specific subject. Again - hashtags are very useful and could be separated out to give a list of subjects being discussed or referenced.  Also extremely useful, although there is a special case to be handled, which is the main discussion hashtag. This is the glue of a twitter discussion, but will crowd out any otehr hashtags in terms of frequency of occurrence.
  There are some variations on this. For example some hashtags for a recurring event may have a root and a date modifier - e.g #MW2012 , #MW2013, etc. Hashtags can often be acronyms and there are also occassionally some acronymous (is that even a word?) hashtags that can lead to confusion. For instance the hastag #rdg has been used for some time by a local newspaper to donate the town of Reading, UK, but the popularity of japanese anime Red Data Girl led to the #rdg hashtag being widely adopted to refer to that.
  http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2132218_red_data_girl_fans_twitter_storm_over_rdg_hashtag

• URLs - this is also very handy as it is the twitter equivalent of a reference. These are usually not the actual url, but a shortened referral url. Again these were considered to be worth separating out as they are resources associated with the discussion and lead to more in depth ideas that are too long for representation on twitter
• RT or RT:  - (ReTweet) this is the standard etiquette for acknowledging a tweet being sent is not original is someone else's tweet being sent on. It is equivalent to a traditional credit. If followed by a @username, there is an implicaton that this is the person who sent the original tweet, but this is not a strict rule. While RT might be useful, it was decided not to bother to distinguish usernames that might be being credited rather than mentioned or included
• VIA  - similar to RT, this is usually an acknowledgement that this is a secondary retweet, naming the person who sent it on. It is almost always the case that a following @username is the person who retweeted it initially.
• "words in quotes" - Quotation marks are used as a shorthand for a direct quotation from another tweet. 

Effectively, everything else inside a tweet is just the body of the message, so for the purposes of the Psychic Hive Mind Reader, the algorithm starts like this

1. go get some tweets
2. strip out and make a list of @usernames
3. strip out and make a list of #hashtags
4. strip out and make a list of urls
5. make a list of everything else

Psychic Hive Mind Reader - it's alive! ALIVE I tell you!

A  first draft of the facial features of Psychic Hive-Mind Reader. Ha ha - that's not creepy is it?!

The head for this automaton came from a damaged mannequin from an exhibition
"Hollywood Costume" at the V&A in fact - it's possibly Sharon Stone or Audrey Hepburn, but I can't be sure!

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Here's the rather beautifully made torso, looking like classical greek marble in the sun and azure table tennis table.



























Beautifully made though this mannequin was, only the top part was needed. The head and shoulders needed to be sawn off, to leave a flat base. This is easier said than done. The main thing to get right was the marking. (Check twice, saw once!) The simplest way to get a sense of the line around the body was to use sticky tape, in this case our old friend insulation tape. Sticky, but not so sticky that it strips the paint layer off!



Another handy use for the wonder tape!

Below is the head. The body is GRP (fibreglass), so the sawdust is evil, ground glass lung-killing stuff.





























The next thing to do was get some eyeholes. The sockets were to be made from deodorants as per usual.
The eyeballs were put in place to get a rough place to draw the stencils.

















The orange thing is the ball mount from a manly deororant (it suggests so on the label at least)

















So more crude surgery for the mannequin. Drill to the head, followed by jigsaw to cut out the sockets, ouch...

















And don't they look fetching. Vaguely reminds me of the film nine http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472033/
and possibly even Fantasic Planet
https://www.google.co.uk/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&authuser=0&q=fantastic_planet

Tremendous

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Next, the rather beautiful skull needed a face, which is a cast off moulding from Twitr_janus, but cut into pieces and reapplied to fit the shape of the mannequin. As per usual this was attached with the marvellous hot glue gun. This one has a fantastic slim-bore nozzle and can be used to inject under the skin.


























The rod below is glued to a bolt being fed through a restrictive passage through the throat, where a hand don't fit. Once in place it was fixed with hot glue and the rod removed

Below the shape of the face is being drawn to act as a guide for fitting the skin face on. The rest of the head was to be left blank. The face is both a real mask and a metaphorical one (if that isn't a tiny tad meta!)
On the right the monitor mount is shown attached to the mounting bolt fitted previously.

The pencil line was then covered with clear gaffer tape (clear so it could still be seen!), then the line traced with a scalpel

The tape inside the line was removed. The tape is there to protect the surrounding skull area's painwork from grubby fingers, chip, scratches and hot glue whilst working on it.

The face mask was glued on from features of the latex face mask, and offcuts streched over gaps and trimmed to fit.






























And there you have it. The basic head, now with face...

HiveMind FortuneReader reading collective minds on twitter

Here are draft designs for HiveMind FortuneTeller. There rough, but it's forming into something slowly...

It's not quite the right look, but the general vibe is a creepy head (fortune readers have to look creepy) with a screen to show the data inside the mind.

Twitter mind read in action

This video shows the current visualisation of the mind reading. This is a Processing sketch, that pulls a set of admin parametes from a remote Google spreadsheet, then uses it to form a query upon the Twitter API.



Below is a sceen shot, but the video shows it live

Concept drawings :)

I'm still working up the design, so thought I'd try a concept drawing as graphic novel to see if that gave me any sideways ideas. This is even rougher!

Making a restricted-key data input by physically hacking up a keyboard

Hive-mind Fortune-reader

This is roughly what the keyboard will look like on the fortune teller machine. It is needed to allow people to enter their twitter name. It's neat, but not really quite the ideal look. It could quite happily benefit from being steampunked or even just fairground-punked or something. If time allowed, I might have carved wooden keys. Actually maybe, Bakelite..

Hey ho, in the meantime it delivers the necessary, even if a little un-designed.


On the other hand, the good thing about testing these possibilities is that you get to hack through plastic in a generally therapeutic way...

Before and after...















To start with, first unscrew everything, to reveal the innards...















The key mechanism is great...















Hacking off the end of the board eighteenth-century-ship style - with a saw, then planimg it down - so enjoyable!















This looked pretty neat in the spring...


But underneath all that, there's a rather sensitive set of plastic circuit matrices. These capture the physical presses of keys and make the corresponding electronic connections


Sadly, I managed to kill the first board by some rather unsubtle trimming (subtltey is not really my thing), so take two was rather more careful. Trim the plastic and just fold the silicone and printed acetate key-press sheets...















There are two sheets of contacts, separated by a masking sheet. The top sheet has a matrix of electrodes which can connect to corresponding contacts on the bottom sheet. In the middle, the masking sheet has holes that control which contacts can touch. Before folding the sheets, the contacts for any keys that need to be neutralised (like CTRL or WINDOWS or ALT) need to be prevented from touching, and therefore activating anything undesirable!

What you can't really see here is the sellotape used to do this. This was applied accross the sheets to mask the contacts. This needed some filigree-level scalpel work to cut round the screw fittings...



This is the orignal gaffer tape attempt which was too crude...















Eventually though, the second attempt worked and the cut down keyboard finally worked..
















This works, but I still want to individually re-create each key...

Fortune Teller Hive

OK, a new project to be playing with - Fortune Teller Hive!

Creepy automata and enjoying being spooked in a crowd.

Fortune Teller Hive is a plot to make a physical fortune telling automaton that you find at fairgrounds, but mash it up with online digital social interaction to create a more colective experience, and generally play about with some concepts of persona and social buzz.

Here's an example of on the epic 'Zoltar' machines
They usually come in large glass case at fairgrounds. You put your money in and it reads your fortune. There's an enjoyably creepy magic about such automata. Like puppets and ventriloquists' dolls they are all just a bit Frankenstein - inanimate people-like objects with life breathed into them.

One aspect of the enjoyment of such creepy things is that they are seldomly experienced alone. Most occur in public areas. I am interested in the emotional aura that occurs in such places that comes specifically from there being groups of people experiencing it at the same time.

In fairs, cinemas,  circuses, theatres, amusement arcades and on theme park rides, the thrill is not just from the slightly risky or creepy nature of the exeriences, it is heightened by sharing it with other people and a social sensing of other people's excitement.

The shared collective excitment is different than that if one experienced something alone - the gestalt consciousness, if you like. This changes the emotional sense of the surroundings. It is other than what it would feel like on one's own. If the attraction is working well, when a crowd uses it, the crowd tends to increase excitement and risk-taking as the presence offers a sense of safety in numbers. Having said that, it is possible to feel swayed by collective disappointment too, if the experience is not working!

Why an automaton?

Anyway, as much as I love making creepy shit, I am not that interested in perfoming with it to an audience. I love puppet-making, for example, I but can't be bothered to perform with them. This has led me to think I should make more stand-alone interactive things, rather than props for a performer.

The most obvious things are automata.

So what has all this got to do with social media?

I didn't want it to be a passive thing though. I wanted to explore how people might contribute to the experience, so that it was changed when people engaged with it. This led me to the idea (eventually) of a fortune teller who's brain is empty of thought unless used. That is, the only way that it could tell fortunes was if it had thoughts induced in its mind as a result of lots of people engaging with it simultaneously.

The obvious advantage of this crowd-sourced model is that the Fortune Teller would offer a different style and character of fortune reading, depending on the people who ere engaging with it at any one time.

And this is really what effective social media do. They provide a standard platform for engagement that enables a large range of very different collective gestalt experiences to be created, from one single platform. The medium is creating a means to build social experiences, based on the active participation of individuals.

What can we learn from Twitter hashtags?

Twitter hashtags are a great example of a simple mechanism enabling a huge range of different shared social digital experiences. The sense of conversation that anyone has when posting using any one hashtag is driven by the way all the people using that tag do so.

WTF?

OK, this is getting weird now.  The bottom line is what Fortune Teller Hive is hoping to achieve is to create a physical automaton, that is connected digitally to multiple people, using some sort of social media, to create the content of its thoughts and therefore the nature of its readings.  I'm not going to build social media, so the starting point is to use the dev tools of openly available social media, starting with Twitter..

But mainly it should be ceepy!

Here's a new twitter account for making this happen...