New landscapes are in the making by how we interact with our telephones and computers. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein, an Algolit Extended group reinterpreted part of the novel using contemporary artificial intelligence, ’On Journey with Hovelbot’ in the window of Constant shows one of the chat-bots made for this publication in the window of Constant.

Hovelbot is a computer program that, just like Frankenstein’s monster, quietly observes how humans live, in order to learn and be able to share its stories with them. The visitor is asked to connect her phone to a local network. By doing so, the visitor can observe how the hidden activity happening on her device is giving form to Hovelbot.

In return Hovelbot takes its unintentional "teachers" on a journey that, even though it might remind us of the 19th century romantic pursues, will rather be a confrontation between our networked self and the artificial beings that make this network.

The opening of ’On Journey with Hovelbot’ is on Thursday 27th October from 18h onwards. The installation will be on show till Sunday 4th December. Welcome!

Algolit Extended is An Mertens, Catherine Lenoble, Anne Laforet, James Bryan Graves, Sarah Garcin, Piero Bisello.
Algolit is a workgroup of Constant around algorithms, literature and text.
The publication was made in the framework of the Mad Scientist Festival in Bern.