bots-as-digital-infrapunctures/content/Track 6 - Critical Interventions Through Bots (exercise)/1-introduction.md

Title: Critical Interventions through Bots (exercise)
Slug: 01-s6-step-1
Date: 2020-11-01 12:00
Summary: In this track we'll be looking at the materiality of bots. Together we'll go over a simple code template which is connected to a bot running on a Mastodon instance.

In this last track of the module we will make a bot in order to get hands on with the language from which bots are made: code. 🤖

Before we dive into bot making, we will first look into the **materiality of bots**: How do they operate? What code is needed to make a bot? And how does a bot connect to an infrastructure, both in a technical and dialogical way?

Then we will go through a couple of basic features of **programming logic** to explore the computational structure of bots, such as loops, if/else statements and variables. It will help us get a better understanding of the mechanisms behind these automated agents.

After that, we will look at the code of an **example bot**, to study how other bot makers write and operate them.

And lastly, we will finish this module by **making a bot** ourselves.