Riot Chat

In spring 2014 I was part of a collaboration with FAT, Piratbyrån opened a "retrospective" called Piracy and Friends, at the Furtherfield Gallery in London.^[1] The exhibition's central theme was how piracy and sharing create group dynamics, promotes relationships, and forms the basis of artistic methods and contexts.^[2] At the exhibition, I showed the installation “Riot Chat”, which had started out of the piracy visualizations.

Riot Chat is a Twitter-IRC-game remix. The project realized with the javascript framework Meteor.^[3] Riot Chat is an homage to kopimi (copyme), a symbol showing that you want to be copied, and a sandbox for an anti-surveillance communication protocol. Occupy was right: we need to get rid of super managers holding the world down. Since revolutions constantly fail in the streets, we must simultaneously continue to riot the Internet.

ENTER RIOT CHAT!^[4]

http://copyriot.meteor.com/

MANTAIN HARDLINE KOPIMI ^[5]

The Chat and OmniHal 

To talk to OmniHal, the chat bot, type /omnihal and then your message on  OmniHal has a young brain. Feed OmniHal with text in the top right corner. Change the topic of the chat by typing /topic and then the new topic. The OmniHal  is Markov chain^[6] chatbot with a web api implemented in python.

The avatar gif animations are from F.A.T’s occupyinter.net ^[7] 

The Game

Help expand the territory of kopimi (copyme) pyramids by getting rid of eyeballs box. Click, move and communicate.

Play Music

Pump up the volume and suggest tracks to OmniHAL.

Chat Mode

Switch from riot to IRC mode as pleased.

Fork the Project

Fork the project here ^[8]

See post at F.A.T ^[9]

Don’t contact Future. Future will contact you! ^[10]

First draft of Riot Chat

Final layout of Riot Chat

Installation view of Riot Chat