With modern messaging systems like Twitter, the simple re-Tweet function represents a sign of digital empathy. It's not something that a user is saying they agree with or disagree with necessarily: it's just a virtual nudge. Equally, people are sharing photographs of what they're doing online with such frequency that we can now recall images of places we've never even visited - and this in turn confuses our own history of where we've been, what we've seen and the way we recall memories. If we look at Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, the 'replicants' that populate it all possess two lead qualities:

They are robots built upon other people's memories and they are in pursuit of empathy

So using this as a starting point, we developed a simple bot system that fed off Tweets and then used its own re-Tweeted messages as a source for uncovering new media and new data. These first bots were essentially recycling the internet and it was fun watching them do their own thing. We knew roughly what each one should be doing, but had no idea that it was going to pick a specific piece of music or a particular image. But then things got weirder. It turns out that if you leave a bot like that alone for a few days, an actual personality begins to emerge.