Why Some Dolls Are Bad

Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a dynamically generated graphic novel built on the Facebook platform. The work assembles a stream of images from Flickr that match certain tags and dynamically mixes them with original text in order to produce a perpetually changing narrative.

Users who subscribe to the application in Facebook can capture pages from the graphic novel and save, reorder, and distribute them.

The novel engages themes of ethics, fashion, artifice and the self, and presents a re-examination of systems and materials including mohair, contagion, environmental decay, Perspex cabinetry, and false-seeming things in nature such as Venus Flytraps.

How Does it Work?

Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a graphic novel that is built as a Facebook application. To experience it in its native environment, you will need to add the application to your Facebook account, where it will appear on your profile.
It operates by streaming images and text into a frame on your profile page. The image and text combine to create a page in the book.

As you read, you advance to the next page by clicking 'update image'. That will cause the work to reload a new image and text combination.

Since the novel is dynamically generated, you will never see the same page twice.

If you like the page you are reading and would like to save it, click "capture image". The page will be saved to an area of the application with functionality that allows you to reorder the pages, organize them into chapters, and distribute them to other people.

Kate Armstrong:

Kate Armstrong is an artist and writer with interest in networks, social media, urban space, poetics, and computation. Her work examines tensions between digital and analogue systems, and looks to bring digital structures - both functional and metaphorical - into low-fi models and physical spaces as a way to interrogate contemporary culture. She is also engaged with text and experimental narrative, especially open forms that bring poetics and computational function together. In the past this has taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeography, installation, audio, performance, painting, and robotics.

Armstrong is the Director of Upgrade! Vancouver, which is part of the Upgrade! International network. She has taught at Emily Carr Institute and holds a position at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology in the Faculty of Applied Science at Simon Fraser University in Surrey, British Columbia.

More: http://www.katearmstrong.com