Frankenstein Revisited

Artificial intelligence can be as complex as it can be simple. Exactly 200 years after Mary Shelly’s publication of ’Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus’, in September 2016, on the invitation of Roland Fischer, curator of Mad Scientist, a yearly festival in Bern, an extended Algolit group started working on literary chatbots based on or inspired by this gothic novel. We engaged in the conversation around artificial intelligence by sharing ideas, works and reflections about the topic reframed in the dispositive of the novel: we talked about Frankenstein the text, the inventor and the monster. Using one of the oldest chat protocols (IRC) we created bots and went into dialogue with them, discovered their reactions, scrutinized their feelings during the interaction.

All information, publication and code: http://www.algolit.net/frankenstein/

With: Piero Bisello (art historian & writer), Sarah Garcin (graphic designer and programmer), James Bryan Graves (computer scientist), Anne Laforet (artist & critic), Catherine Lenoble (writer) and An Mertens (artist & writer).