Chat with the bot here. Or mention @avantgarble.bsky.social in a Bluesky post. (currently it only answers once a day).

In the early 20th century, a group of Italian and Swiss artist revolted by the horrors of WWI started making art by rejecting traditional art values, such as rationality, beauty and logic. They explored randomness and absurdity and pave the way to conceptual and surreal art. Many artists explored with incorporating randomness in the generation of their art.

One of the triumph of the current times is the development of smart chatbots, the most famous of them being chatGPT. That chatbot uses the latest advances of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce careful responses to any question from the user. Dada artist that often displayed readymade pieces of art taking daily objects and putting them out of context in an art gallery would probably love the tools we have at our disposal.

This project is a rejection to the smartness and rational thinking of modern by being a chatbot that produces random (but English like) response to the users input. Each prompt has a unique answer. The work democratizes the access to Dadaist art by giving a short dadaist text. It also makes the viewer participate in the creation of the art by requiring its input.

In a Dadaist move the name "AvantGarble" was chosen by chatGPT.

The front end is writing in React with Typescript and it is located in client. The backend uses Express.js to serve the client and the answers. The answers are send letter by letter to the client using websockets.

The answers are generated by a n-gram language model at a character level. The n-grams come from the Blog Authorship Corpus and are stored on Github as a collection of .json files.

Build the bot with npm run build and run with npm run start.

For deployment I use google cloud run synched with Github.