Andrei Mylnikov, “In Peaceful Fields” 1950

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Follow @SovietArtBot Here

What’s Soviet Art Bot?

A bot that tweets out a socialist realist painting, along with their painters, every six hours.

"Discussion of a Bad Grade"
Sergiy Grigoriev, 1950 pic.twitter.com/cNQ8HT6Biw

— SovietArtBot (@SovietArtBot) February 14, 2018

The data comes from WikiArt, a “non-profit project featuring some 150,000 artworks by 2,500 artists, localized in 5 languages.”, from their Socialist Realism category.

How does Soviet Art Work?

For an extremely in-depth post, please read here.

Tools:

Here’s the architecture scribble:

The high-level overview:

• Paintings are downloaded through the WikiArt API
• Local processing cleans up JSON metadata
• Paintings and metadata are uploaded to an S3 bucket on AWS
• A Lambda picks up the files from S3 and tweets out a timed cron job to Twitter through Twython
• You see beautiful socialist realism art

GitHub Repo

Find all the code here: veekaybee/soviet-art-bot

ToDo

1) Source more paintings. WikiArt is fantastic, but has only 500ish paintngs available in the socialist realism category. I’d like to find more sources with high-quality metadata and a significant collection of artworks.

2) Fix the code so that no painting repeats more than once a week. That seems like the right amount of time for Twitter followers to not get annoyed.

3) Create a front-end where anyone can upload a work of socialist realism for the bot to tweet out.

4) Machine learning and deep learning potential possibilities:

• Mash with #devart to see if the bot can create fun headlines for paintings based on painting content
• Extract colors from artworks by genre and see how they differ between genres
• See if there’s a way to filter out artworks with nudity/questionable content

About Me

I’m Vicki and I do data science and engineering work using tools like Python, Spark, and R. I write about that here.. In my spare time, I read books and wrangle toddlers.