Two Headlines

Darius Kazemi

Portland, Oregon, United States

Begin

Author(s)

Statement

Two Headlines is a Twitter bot that attempts to automate a kind of lazy Twitter joke where a human confuses the subjects of two news items that everyone is talking about on Twitter. An unintended consequence of its particular algorithm is that the bot that also writes near-future late-capitalist dystopian microfiction, in a world where there is no discernible difference between corporations, nations, sports teams, brands, and celebrities.

Bio

Darius Kazemi is an internet artist under the moniker Tiny Subversions. His best known works are the Random Shopper (a program that bought him random stuff from Amazon each month), Content, and Forever (a tool to generate rambling thinkpieces of arbitrary length), and The Ethical Ad Blocker (a tool that blocks both web ads and web content). He has a small army of Twitter and Tumblr bots that he builds because they make him laugh. He founded NaNoGenMo, where participants spend a month writing algorithms to generate 50,000 word novels, and Bot Summit, a yearly gathering of people who make art bots. He cofounded Feel Train, a creative technology cooperative.

Metadata

Year: 2013

Language: English

Keywords: remix, Twitter, generative, bot, networked

Tech Details

Twitter bot, sample output available

Editorial Statement

Darius Kazemi’s Two Headlines is a Twitter bot built in Node, a server-side JavaScript engine, to craft mixed-up versions of popular headlines. The bot was inspired by a tweet from Allison Parrish, who suggested that mixed-up headline jokes should be theoretically easy to automate. The logic behind the bot is simple: Kazemi’s algorithm grabs a random category and headline from Google News, then replaces the topic word with the topic from another category. The results include headlines such as “Bandai Namco Announces Donald Trump Controller for Wii U” and “The First 'Smart TVs' in 43 Years Endured More Than You Can Imagine on the Way.”

Downloads

Download Twitter Archive
Description : Twitter archive
Requirements : Modern web browser (such as Chrome)

Download Source Archive
Description : Source code archive
Requirements : Full requirements listed in archive

Addenda

Previous Publication

Further References

This Flash work has been preserved with Ruffle by the Electronic Literature Lab in February 2021. When it launches, a play button may appear that you will need to click; after launching it, the work may take time to appear.

The Electronic Literature Lab could not preserve this Flash work in February 2022. We are looking for a solution and plan to preserve it at a later date.

This Flash work has been emulated with Conifer by the Electronic Literature Lab in August 2021. To view this emulation click here.

This Flash work has been preserved with Ruffle by the Electronic Literature Lab in February 2025. However, the external link to the "dynamic grammar network" has not been preserved.

This Flash work has been emulated with Conifer by the Electronic Literature Lab in August 2021. To view this emulation click here.

This Flash work has been emulated with Conifer by the Electronic Literature Lab in July 2021. Click to view the emulation for desprendiendo and sumergida.