Back in February, Max Leyzerovich, a designer at nclud, created a Twitter bot with the handle @V2FzaGluZ3Rvbg. You might have heard about it.
The bot randomly tweets out pictures from D.C.’s traffic cameras, sending one image about every 15 minutes. Accompanying the majority of these images is text from stark breaking news headlines like “Latest U.N. Central Africa sex abuse allegations elicit disgust.”
The account is a little confusing — The Washingtonian called it “decidedly weird” — but it’s meant to raise awareness about just how much surveillance there is in the District. “No commentary, but just to increase the conversation around surveillance,” Leyzerovich told the Washingtonian. “I guess it’s more of an amplifier of an issue. I’m aware how artsy that sounds.”
But now Leyzerovich has a new bot. @DistrictPic tweets a photo from the National Mall’s “Netherlands Carillon Webcam” about every half hour or so. The webcam sits across the Potomac, looking straight at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and Capitol Building in the background. Its photos look like this:
Why the new project?
“I realized how dark and dreary [the photos from the traffic cam bot] were,” Leyzerovich told Technical.ly. “I wanted to make something similar that could be beautiful. Also everybody loves tweeting sunrise/sunset pics so I figured why not make a bot that captures that?”
Fair enough. We’ve got to admit, these sunrise captures are pretty nice:
Leyzerovich also hinted he’s working on more — so keep an eye on twitter dot com.
