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Shiv Integer is a bot whose entire purpose in life is to create bizarre objects for 3D printers. It has been living for several months on 3D printer project site Thingiverse, posting objects cobbled together out of dozens of other objects listed on the site. The results are art or spam, depending on your perspective. Last month, artists Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef finally came out as the humans behind Shiv Integer, showcasing the results of the bot's work at an event called (appropriately) The Art of Bots in London's Somerset House.

Taken on its own terms, Shiv Integer's work is fanciful and amusing. Each piece looks like a mutant gadget, possibly unprintable, often with one recognizable item merging into another one. The best part is that even the names of the objects are a random salad of words taken from other objects on Thingiverse, creating inadvertent absurdist poetry like "quick cat near a jaw," "disc on top of an e-juice golf," "automatic event adapter," and "customizable damage mask." The bot is known to post several times per day, and in the "about" section of the entry it always credits users whose objects it has repurposed (the bot only works with objects that have been CC licensed for remixing).

Artists Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef explain the idea behind their project:

Shiv Integer is a bot that inhabits Thingiverse, a site for sharing 3D printable models. The bot downloads models and uses them to make randomised mash-ups that get posted back on Thingiverse. The bot adheres to the Creative Commons copyright licensing granted by the model’s authors, only remixing files that are published with the freedom to be modified. The bot has been running anonymously since February, receiving hundreds of complaints and online harassment from the Thingiverse community, amid a few fans responding with poetry and defending its rights. The bot recently surpassed two hundred creations.

Today, it is closer to 300.

The Thingiverse community's reaction seems to be part of the art project, and this aspect of the bot was far less whimsical. Most Thingiverse users took it in stride or were just mildly confused. "The crap is going on here? lol" wondered a typical user in response to a particularly mangled-looking work called "master by a dual adapter." But in early March, after Shiv Integer had been active for about two weeks, its flood of randomly generated things began to elicit some particularly harsh comments. As user Terminus put it, Shiv Integer is basically a spam bot:

The spammy part is in posting so many individual, uniformly similar projects in such a short time span. This hijacks the "front page" with your stuff, and pushes other people's stuff faster and farther down the pages... The practice is unfair to other up-loaders who want as much front page (top pages) exposure as possible. And it annoys readers who want to see the variety of new ideas that come up daily, without being distracted by your stuff...The "remix" sends people email.

Several other users chimed in to agree, citing the Thingiverse terms of use, which forbid bots and site scraping. But then user 29Autumn wondered, "Take a moment and think. What if this is not spam? What if someone desperately needs an out, a way to communicate." Though many users were annoyed, it's clear why artists might want to start this kind of conversation. It forced people to ask whether they could tell the difference between a spam bot and a "desperate" person. Many people continued to address Shiv Integer as if it were a person, despite clear evidence that it was a bot.

Shiv Integer's "retractable mount house" also got people arguing over whether it was really art if it was produced by a bot, which was genuinely interesting. "I doubt that there's even a person behind this... just a mindless robot that randomly picks bits of other people's work and sticks it together," said Frankvdh. Added DJA, "Art is a creation by someone, and this is not art, it is a computer generated assembly of other people's things in no order or fashion. Calling it art is to put the thought of art, that is, someone's creativity, to shame. No, this is a pure spambot created assembly, made from a spambot script." But JamesNothing defended Shiv Integer's "CPv1 in a dual UM2," writing, "This thing is strange! I like it! I'm happy I helped with my model ;D."

In response to user comments, the artists felt the need to explain that Shiv Integer isn't spam even though it doesn't really write good descriptions of its creations:

These objects have no utilitarian function. The description has been used as best as possible to describe from what they were made and how they were made. There is no rational thought process behind these works...

Some users responded by suggesting that perhaps Shiv Integer could put its work on a separate website so that people on Thingiverse would stop getting e-mail alerts when their work was remixed—and so that the bot's work wouldn't shove things down the front page. The artists did not respond nor did they engage with the community beyond their "About Shiv Integer" page. As a result, one has to conclude that part of the intent behind the Shiv Integer project was to troll people on Thingiverse. It was a mild trolling, but it definitely pissed people off. If you look at the comments on the bot's Thingiverse design page, you'll see that most of them are negative, ranging from grumbles to all-caps rage. Perhaps Plummer-Fernandez and Deswaef wanted to figure out a new way to make confrontational art, and this is what they came up with? Or maybe they were just hoping that their bot would roam freely and finally find acceptance among its human counterparts. Either way, Shiv Integer isn't just about quirky, silly gadgets. It is also about making trouble. This bot forces us to wonder whether art and creativity are just another kind of spam.

Listing image by Shiv Integer