Meet Gagbot the meme-maker. The creators of Gagbot devised a notoriously complex artificial intelligence that would instantly write captions on your behalf — in a very straightforward mobile app. The idea is that it’d do all the hard work, and you’ll just have to choose from one of the suggested options.
#shukadesign 2019
The identity is as silly as the memes generated by the bot. Of course the AI is not smart enough to write a caption that makes you laugh because it’s genuinely funny and not because it’s plain ridiculous.
The duck came about as a result of deconstructing the cultural significance of memes, and linking them back to pop art, and looking through the old Disney comic books some (most) of us grew up with, and recalling Donald Duck, of course. It never got a name of its own, but at different points we considered Confused Duck, Bipolar Duck, and M.U. Duck.
The bot can mechanically construct new phrases based on what it’s learned in its (rather short) lifetime, but it completely lacks cultural context — which is an essential part of a good joke.
It’s all quite surreal, and more than memetic, and we very much like it. The Gagbot duck, following this mechanics, was born weird and clumsy and somewhat impudent — and, obviously, it too can be decomposed into parts, and then recomposed again. Because, algorithms. We attribute this transformation to his rather loud laughter —
but with such a character you can never be fully certain.
SHUKA
creative directors → ivan velichko
creative directors → ivan velichko
art director, designer, illustrator → mary yudina
designed by shuka®
© all rights reserved
