Murderous Multimodality

Within the busy The Nonhuman Turn conference Twitter stream (which was marked by the #c21nonhuman hashtag) there loomed a rather apt entity: a distinctively nonhuman interlocutor by the name of Richard Gruesome. This zombie-esque character, apparently inspired by C21 director Richard Grusin (they both wear the same hat), offered regular tweets that riffed off the conference theme and Grusin’s work. Indeed, Gruesome’s Twitter profile states that before this so-called nonhuman turn he ‘[m]ay have been Richard Grusin, but [is] now just the ramblings of his half-eaten bot-brain’. Building on this nonhuman motif, he appears to follow a collection of objects, animals, dead or fictitious characters and even their dead – as in inactive – Twitter accounts. His blog (linked to from the Twitter profile) contains the fuller content of some of his tweets, as well as a chat function so you can talk to him, and a curious button suggesting you might also clone him. During the conference some people cautiously ‘retweeted’ a few of Gruesome’s tweets, a handful of well-known attendees followed his Twitter account, and many wondered who had created this nonhuman automated ‘twitter bot’. Well, the creator – it might be more precise to say co-creator – of Richard Gruesome was me. Read more…