automatic war poetry

2018
Twitter bot (no longer active)
project on github · full documentation on post(non)fiction (in Russian)

This Twitter bot was launched in 2018. It generated 3-line poems about war in Russian. I trained a Markov chain algorithm on a small corpus of diverse writings on war and state violence: Russian translation of The Iliad of Homer, Alexander Etkind’s “Warped Mourning” — a book on soviet intellectuals imprisoned in Gulag, Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” (a collection of short stories about labour camp life in 1930s). The bot was also monitoring the Twitter feed, collecting all the Russian tweets discussing current world conflicts — mainly the conflict between pro-Russian separatists in Donbas and Ukrainian army. So the poems mixed together various ways of speaking about war, as well as various affects induced by war. Those texts, although generated by a simple algorithm, speculated on the extreme violence of war and the traumas induced by it. Their collage, cut-up esthetics attempted to deconstruct the very language that made the war possible — the very dehumanizing language that legitimated state violence in USSR and current Russia.

Some English translations are provided below.

***
socialism is a crime so that’s great
socialism is a crime so that’s great
crap war war

***
once again the dead lost it all
once again the dead lost it all
— — —

***
Anisimov spoke about the Holocaust
it will only be the milk of the most just mortals
— — — —

***
I obediently sank above the negative present
this one spread out behind him - such cases of disobedience
— —

***
what else but the dirty hair
what else but the dirty hair
be — — —

***
for real native life of the Russian people
they pushed us where we were in Russia long before 1989
to kill — —