Soviet Art Bot

Andrei Mylnikov, “In Peaceful Fields” 1950

Star

What’s Soviet Art Bot?

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

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:

Python AWS VCS/CI
Requests boto3 GitHub
Twython Lambda Travis-CI
pytest S3  

Here’s the architecture scribble:

architecture

The high-level overview:

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:

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.