Bot-mimicry

This collection is dedicated to documenting the practice of bot-mimicry - i.e. the humans mimicking (ro)bots mimicking humans. An important characteristic of bot-mimicry is that the mimicry happens in a medium that is currently inhabited by automated agents, such as text or speech; the performance of bot-mimicry takes place in media where we habitually encounter (ro)bots, such as chatterbots or automated voice assistants. This means that the practice of bot-mimicry is materially consistent with contemporary proceedings of automated software. Bot-mimicry is also connected to the current global labor market, specifically services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, where humans are employed to produce simple outputs in a way that overlaps with our current expectations to computational machinery. On the margins of bot-mimicry, we find collaborative projects where humans edit or modify output from computers in a way that is ambiguous as to which entity contributed with what in the final outcome. Even though it is distinct herefrom, bot-mimicry is closely connected to other performative practices happening in-between humans and computers, such as the portrayal of robots in sci-fi cinema. Bot-mimicry has a history that goes back at least to 1984 with the book The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed, which is an early case where human performance was understood as the output from a computational program. Today the practice of bot-mimicry is blossoming, since the practice emerges as a quotidian and situated way of reckoning with and rethinking the current status of automated software in our everyday lives.