Twitter’s Art Assignment Bot Is Here To Inspire

For those of you who long for the days of obtuse art school assignments, Twitter has a solution: Art Assignment Bot, a bot created by artist and programmer Jeff Thompson that randomly generates art assignments for the inspiration-hungry masses. Art Assignment Bot is simple—every hour, it creates a randomly generated art assignment, culled from a set of words art teachers have used when doling out such assignments for decades. As you can imagine, some are more coherent than others, but they all maintain the tone of an actual art assignment.

Thompson told the Creators Project that while he didn’t necessarily intend to create a critique of art school, which he says he actually quite enjoyed, he did program the bot to include “what I see as over-generic or overused art themes (home, family, memory). There are also topics from historical artworks. For example, ‘war’ is based on Goya’s famous ‘Disasters of War’ series. I also threw in some more contemporary curveballs, like ‘glitch’ and what seems to be Twitter’s favorite: ‘cats on the internet.'” Perhaps, then, it is less a critique and more of a democratization—an MFA education is now (kind of) available to anyone with an Internet connection.

Thompson also mentioned that the bot has gotten responses, some of which are actual, handmade artifacts, and many of which are more quintessentially “Internet” in their approach. Below are a few of Art Assignment Bot’s best assignments, for your brainstorming pleasure.

bot3 bot4 bot5 bot bot2


Follow Artnet News on Facebook:


Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.