Created to mark the bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Rewriting Frankenstein is an interactive exploration of the novel by Neil Jenkins. It takes Victor Frankenstein’s creature, assembled from mismatched body parts, as its analogy.
Readers recreate the story word by word, choosing the next word from possibilities that follow the current word elsewhere in Shelley’s original text. Beginning at the opening of the book or from any word within it, each decision splices a new path through the novel while retaining its vocabulary and local grammatical possibilities.
Completed sentences were published by @Mary_W_Shelley and answered in the same manner by @Frankenbotstein, an automated Twitter bot. People could also address Frankenbotstein directly to elicit a generated reply, extending the cut-up dialogue beyond the artwork’s interface.
The browser-based rewriting interface remains available. Its historical Twitter integration should be understood as part of the original work and may no longer operate following changes to that platform’s services.
The two accounts
@Mary_W_Shelley published the participant-authored text. @Frankenbotstein generated the responding voice.