Is the computer watching you? It’s hard to tell. You can’t make up your mind. The computer’s attention skips from eye to eye. It has so many, and you wonder how it chooses where to settle its sight. What does the computer see, really? Numbers? In a way, humans see numbers too — light wavelengths can be measured, and that’s basically what eyes do — but we translate them into very different artifacts.

Of course, saying “the computer” is a simplification. It’s not a single entity, but rather a series of commands, of instructions. The program follows the rules that were set up for it, and it follows those rules through many different machines.

Minnesota programmer Derek Arnold made a bot called @FFD8FFDB that tweets color-processed stills from obscure security cameras. He summarized it beautifully in an essay on the project:

My script captures a frame, and gums it up with an Imagemagick script. I modify the colors in the YUV colorspace, crop out identifying information provided in the margins, and ensure the images are consistent. I use Wordnik to generate accompanying text and replace some characters with graphics characters. This is just for effect. @ffd8ffdb’s goal is superficial; I just like the way the tweets look. I enjoy that strangers find it unsettling, amusing, or even uninteresting. Like other Twitter bots, its unending tenacity is part of its charm. Many cameras go dark at night, most not having enough illumination to provide images. The bot doesn’t care and keeps stealing shots.

I wasn’t initially sure from this description, but Derek confirmed to me that @FFD8FFDB is fully automated. You could say the bot has a life of its own — albeit one completely defined by its human creator. And yet @FFD8FFDB keeps going regardless of whether Derek participates. As he said, “I had the initial control of it…”

The bot’s feed contains very few images of people. When I scroll through it, I feel ennui. The world looks abandoned. Derek told me that this sense of melancholy emerged unintentionally. He avoided using cameras that would show humans — even now, if a face appears too clearly, he’ll delete the post — because he didn’t want @FFD8FFDB to be invasive, exploitative, or titillating. Derek searched for image sources in “subsections of the business-class internet” specifically to avoid even the most banal intimacy.

He said as much in his essay, but I was surprised by how straightforward Derek’s artistic goals were. He told me, “[The bot] was a thing that I did that I wasn’t thinking too hard about at first.” He became interested in generative art, inspired by numerous other #botALLYs, and simply acted on his impulses. Scratching this itch involved significant effort: Derek estimated that he’s put in twenty-to-forty hours of work on @FFD8FFDB over the past year. “It took a lot of trial and error to get the look I wanted out of it.”

This project is clearly “of the internet”, as they say. On the phone, Derek and I both stumbled over the bot’s name. He told me, “If I ever thought I’d be saying this out loud, I might have named it differently.” Derek was initially surprised by @FFD8FFDB’s popularity — the account now has more followers than his personal Twitter. He added, “I follow the account myself — I don’t follow all of the stuff that I’ve made — and I like it because it surprises me on a consistent basis.”

My favorite discovery from this conversation is that other Twitter users respond to @FFD8FFDB — literally respond. Derek laughed, “People reply to the bot all the time, and it’s set up to send another image.” Those threads are ready to be explored.