@SelfiesBot: It’s Alive!!!

@SelfiesBot began tweeting last week and already the results have surprised me.

Selfies Bot is a portable sculpture which takes selfies and then tweets the images. With custom electronics and a long arm that holds a camera that points at itself, it is a portable art object that can travel to parks, the beach and to different cities.

I quickly learned that people want to pose with it, even in my early versions with a cardboard head (used to prove that the software works).

Last week, in an evening of experimentation, I added text component, where each Twitter pic gets accompanied by text that I scrape from Tweets with the #selfie hashtag.

This produces delightful results, like spinning a roulette wheel: you don’t know what the text will be until the Twitter website pubishes the tweet. The text + image gives an entirely new dimension to the project. The textual element acts as a mirror into the phenomenon of the self-portrait, reflecting the larger culture of the #selfie.

Produced while an artist-in-residence at Autodesk.

And this is the final version! Just done.

This is the “robot hand” that holds the camera on a 2-foot long gooseneck arm.