I <3 my Mother Bots: Archive, corporeality and écriture matière

This creative and eisegetical piece describes the birth of two Twitter bots whose voices emerge from the author’s late mother’s literary archive. Because the archive is locked in a storage cube overseas, the archival approach is speculative, experimental and under constraint. Performing a stocktake of physical artefacts that the author has access to in Melbourne, and drawing on memory as living archive, the author constructs a website around these archival objects by way of a clickable image map, inspired by Shelley Jackson’s (2006) hypertextual work my body – a Wunderkammer, and using techniques common to écriture féminine and écriture matière (Eades, 2015). When this does not satisfy the author’s archive fever (Derrida, 1995) she builds a poetry bot that tweets pseudorandomly generated poetry, and a second Twitter bot that responds to these poetics using lines from her mother’s unpublished manuscript. The author anthropomorphises her Mother Bots, explains how the Tracery library powers the bots’ code through expanding grammars, considers the ethics of posthumous tweeting, and concludes with an exploration of the chatbot field, including American Artist’s Sandy Speaks (2016) and Maartje Smits’s The Artist Is Not Present (2019), and considers the ephemerality of digital works.