Twitter Archives - Scott Kildall

Blueprint for EquityBot

October 13, 2014/by Scott Kildall

For my latest project, EquityBot, I’ve been researching, building and writing code during my 2 month residency at Impakt Works in Utrecht (Netherlands).

EquityBot is going through its final testing cycles before a public announcement on Twitter. For those of you who are Bot fans, I’ll go ahead and slip you the EquityBot’sTwitter feed: https://twitter.com/equitybot

The initial code-work has involved configuration of a back-end server that does many things, including “capturing” Twitter sentiments, tracking fluctuations in the stock market and running correlation algorithms.

I know, I know, it sounds boring. Often it is. After all, the result of many hours of work: a series of well-formatted JSON files. Blah.

But it’s like building city infrastructure: now that I have the EquityBot Server more or less working, it’s been incredibly reliable, cheap and customizable. It can act as a Twitterbot, a data server and a data visualization engine using D3.

This type of programming is yet another skill in my Creative Coding arsenal. And consists of mostly Python code that lives on a Linode server, which is a low-cost alternative to options like HostGator or GoDaddy, which incur high monthly costs. And there’s a geeky sense of satisfaction in creating a well-oiled software engine.

The EquityBot Server looks like a jumble of Python and PHP scripts. I cannot possibly explain it excruciating detail, nor would anyone in their right mind want to wade through the technical details.

Instead, I wrote up a blueprint for this project.

For those of you who are familiar with my art projects, this style of blueprint may look familiar. I adapted this design from my 2049 Series, which are laser-etched and painted blueprints of imaginary devices. I made these while an artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco in 2011.

A Starting Point: Distributed Capital

September 17, 2014/by Scott Kildall

I’m doing more research on EquityBot —the project for my Impakt Works residency, which I just started a couple of days ago.

EquityBot is a stock-trading algorithm that explores the connections between collective emotions on social media and financial speculation. It will be presented at the Impakt Festival at the end of October.

It will also consist of a sculptural component (presented post-festival), which is the more experimental form.

Many of you are familiar with Paul Baran’s work on designing a distributed network, but many others may not be. He worked for the U.S. Air Force and determined that a central communications network would be vulnerable to attack, and suggested that the United States use a distributed network.
Interestingly, there is a widespread myth that the Internet, derived from APANET, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack using this model. This isn’t the case, just that the architects of the internet transmission protocol heard of Rand’s work and adapted it for packet use. Yet, the myth persists.

On a side note, perhaps military technology could be useful for the public good. If only we could declassify the technology, like Baran did.

The distributed network reminds me of a 3D polygon mesh I think this could be a good source of 3D data-visualization: Distributed Capital. I’ll research this more in the future.

But EquityBot isn’t about networks in the formal sense, it is a project about constructing a predictive model of stock changes based on the idea that Twitter sentiments correlate with fluctuations in stock prices.

Do I know there is a correlation? Not yet, but I think there is a good possibility. One of my reading sources, The Computational Beauty of Nature, sums up the value of simulated models in its introduction. The predictive model might fail in its results but it will likely reveal a greater truth in the economic system that it is trying to predict. Thus, knowing the uncertainty ahead of time will provide a sense of certainty. EquityBot may not “work” but then again, it may.

My source of dissent is the excellent book, The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t by Nate Silver. After reading this, last summer, I was convinced that any predictive analysis would be simply be noise. I was disheartened and halted the EquityBot project (previously called Grantbot) for many months.

However, now I’m not so sure. It seems likely that people’s moods would affect financial decisions, which in turn would affect stock prices. With studies such as this one by Vagelis Hristidis, which found some correlation to Twitter chatter and stock, I think there is something to this, which is why I’ve revisited the EquityBot project.

I’ll follow the Buddhist maxim with this project and embrace its uncertainty.

@SelfiesBot: It’s Alive!!!

May 11, 2014/by Scott Kildall

@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.

@helenkellerbot and @abelincolnbot go live

February 3, 2014/by Scott Kildall

I just activated two more of my Quotebots — Twitterbots that produce daily quotes on the hour + minute of their progenitor’s death —@helenkellerbot and @abelincolnbot.

These are both new members of my Bot Collective project, which is a series of algorithms that post on Twitter (or potentially other places), joining @marktwainbot and @suntzubot.

@helenkellerbot’s first twitter quote summarizes the mission of the Bot Collective: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

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