It's a weird weather station about my hometown of Wartburg, TN. Using live weather data, generative AI, and some special sauce, it provides a little peak into the lives (or at least possible lives) of the 903 people who live here. It hopes to show that generative AI is cool can be used help produce new artistic forms, as opposed to simply reproducing more traditional modes. It's also a nod toward Gibsonian dub, writ big-data.

At it's core there is a simple front-end and back-end set up. On the front end a node.js serves everything up from a database. On the backend a Python script interfaces with a few API's and does some algorthimic prompt generation, calls the Anthropic API, then saves the text to the database. During this phase we mix in variables related to character, tone, sentence syntax, etc. A cron job runs and calls another Python script which itself sets three random cron job times to run the main Python script. Another python script removes the cron job after it has run.

TL;DR: It's your standard meteoro-algorthimic living epic prose poem bro.

Chris Turpin is a researcher, teacher, and artist currently living in East TN. He recently finished his PhD at the Ohio State University, where he taught and researched digital rhetoric, computer science, and cybersecurity. Reach him at cjt.public@gmail.com