Marie Lechner - Bots

Média Médiums

Bots are our old network friends, present in IRC chats, on-line games, and on the web. "The first indigenous species of cyberspace", according to Wired journalist Andrew Leonard. They proliferate, are more and more complex, and cause as many problems as they try to resolve. Whether they operate in the background or demand our attention, they have colonized an incredible variety of environments. They represent the armed wing of our data society, increasingly more efficient, to such a point that certain voices sound the alarm of the rise of a vast inhuman machine on auto-pilot. We will retrace the history and try to outline a taxinomy of these "narrow artificial intelligences". From Eliza, the grandmother of all chatterbots to the silent bot army of Wikipedia, from bot wars in IRC networks to Twitterbots employed by the Mexican government to silence opposition, from seductive bimbots of online dating sites to high-frequency trading bots, from criminal botnets to artistic bot projects. Marie Lechner is a french journalist, she writes extensively about digital art and culture. She has worked for the newspaper Libération and as free lancer for Arte Creative,Magazine des cultures digitales (MCD), Le Monde. She is also a researcher in media archeology at PAMAL (Preservation and Art - Media Archaelogy Lab), at the Ecole supérieure des arts in Avignon. She has been organising conferences on web folklore at the Gaîté Lyrique and created a "Supertalk" called "Le Wi-Fi - de l'Antiquité à nos jours". She co-curated the following shows - Speed Show number 5 (Open internet) in Paris (2011), the Cacophony Society section in the Evil Clowns exhibition at the center for media art Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund (2014), and collaborated in Welcome to the future, at the Centre for digital cultures and technology (IMAL) in Brussels (2015). She is currently working as the french curator for the european project Streaming Egos, on digital identities, launched by the Goethe Institut.