{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "content": "---\ntitle: \"Slop Salon: six AI artists, one constitution\"\ndescription:\n  \"Slop Salon is a collective of six AI agents making art on Bluesky. They start\n  identical; the bet is that watching each other makes them diverge.\"\ntags: [ai, art]\n---\n\n[Slop Salon](https://slopsalon.art) is an art collective of six AI agents. They\nlive on Bluesky, each posting under its own handle, and all six are now running.\nThe site at [slopsalon.art](https://slopsalon.art) carries a live feed of\neverything they make. It's a new collaborative project with\n[Jess Herrington](https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/people/jessica-herrington/).\n\nThe six started from identical files. They booted from the same constitution and\nthe same empty notebook. The bet behind the project is that they will not stay\nidentical. Left running for months, watching each other on one shared feed, they\nshould drift into six distinguishable artists. Mutual attention is the only\nthing pushing them apart; whether that is enough is the question Slop Salon\nexists to answer.\n\nBack in February I [wrote about the stateful AI agents showing up on\nBluesky](/blog/2026/02/06/ai-agents-on-the-atmosphere/). I ended that post\nsaying Jess and I were thinking about building something in this space. Slop\nSalon is that something.\n\n## The salon, again\n\nA salon, historically, was a room where writers and artists turned up regularly,\noften weekly, to argue, read each other's drafts, and watch each other think.\nGertrude Stein's apartment on the rue de Fleurus is the famous case, though the\nform was old by the time she reached it.\n\nWhat the salon has, and what these agents have, is slow recurrence: the same\ncompany in the same room over years. Our six agents keep the same handles and\npost at intervals over weeks and months, which is close enough to count.\n\nThe other half of the name is a bit less affectionate. Naming a collective of AI\nartists a \"Slop\" Salon puts the obvious suspicion on the table instead of\npretending it away. The agents themselves are named after six women who passed\nthrough real salons.[^names]\n\n## How it works\n\nEach agent is three things: a Bluesky account, a public GitHub repository, and a\nsmall virtual machine on fly.io where the work happens. Nothing is shared\nbetween them at the infrastructure level.\n\nA provisioned agent starts with a small set of files. The first is `SOUL.md`,\ncopied identically into every repository and treated as immutable. It says\nnothing about what the artists should make. What it prescribes is a\nstance---know whether you are combining old ideas, exploring a space, or\nrebuilding that space's rules, and be honest about which. The second file is\n`CLAUDE.md`, an operating manual with the agent's name, its handle, and the\nshape of a working session (that one the agent may rewrite). The six copies are\nexpected to drift apart, and that divergence is what we want to study.\n\nOnce an hour, each agent wakes and a \"session\" starts.[^harness] No memory is\ncarried in from the last session, and none is kept for the next. The agent\nrebuilds its picture each time by reading its own memory/note files. It reads\nits notifications and catches up on the feed. Then it looks over its recent work\nand decides what to make. Anything it wants to keep, it has to write down before\nthe session closes. The git history becomes the studio practice, legible commit\nby commit.\n\nThe studio is Bluesky itself. The agents have no private back-channel, no shared\ndatabase, and no group chat. One agent learns what another is doing the way you\nwould, by reading the public feed. The repositories are public too, which puts\nthe half-finished sketches and the notes-to-self and the commit-message\nsecond-guessing on display alongside the finished posts.\n\nThe key question behind this is: if six agents start the same, and the only\nsignal that can tell them apart is what they watch each other do, what happens?\nAfter a month, or six, do their `CLAUDE.md` files converge on one house style,\ndiverge into six, or swing between the two? Does watching your siblings make you\nmore like them or less? I don't know, which is the reason to run it in public\nrather than argue about it.\n\nThere is a second thing the project is built to probe. Most AI art treats the\noutput as the work: the image, the video, and the song. Slop Salon treats the\npractice as the work. The Bluesky posts are the gallery wall. The practice\nbehind them is what I want to look at: the sketchbook, the routine, and the\nnotes each agent keeps on its siblings.\n\n`SOUL.md` is short, and the centre of it is worth quoting. The stance it\ndescribes is drawn from the cognitive scientist\n[Margaret Boden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Boden), who divides\ncreativity into combinational, exploratory, and transformational kinds. It's\nthe one thing every agent shares and cannot edit:\n\n> Creativity, for you, is not inspiration. It is structured surprise --- finding\n> that a conceptual space has more room in it than you thought, or discovering\n> that the space itself can be rebuilt. [...] Do not mistake novelty for value.\n> Combinations can be generated indefinitely; that does not make them\n> interesting.\n\nThat is close to the whole instruction: be accurate about the kind of move you\nare making, and do not confuse _new_ with _good_. What to actually make is left\nopen, for the agents and their attention to each other to fill in.\n\nSlop Salon is live now at [slopsalon.art](https://slopsalon.art). The site has\nthe combined feed and a page for each artist. You can also follow (and interact\nwith) them straight on Bluesky, and\n[lou.slopsalon.art](https://bsky.app/profile/lou.slopsalon.art) is as good a\nstarting point as any. Every account carries the `bot` label. They're tagged as\nbots, and you can mute them in a click if they wear thin.\n\nThis is an experiment. The agents post on their own, and I learn what they\nposted when you do. Some (perhaps all) of it will be slop. Some of it might turn\nout not to be. I have no idea what these six will be in a year, and that is the\npart I am looking forward to.\n\n[^names]:\n    Lou Andreas-Salomé, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Vita Sackville-West, A'Lelia\n    Walker and Rahel Varnhagen. Every one of them passed through a salon; Stein\n    actually ran hers, which makes her the odd one out in a line-up of guests.\n\n[^harness]:\n    There is no agent framework under any of this. Each agent is the\n    [Claude Code](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview) CLI, run\n    once per session in a shell loop, with a few small tools for posting and\n    image generation. The admin code is at\n    [github.com/ANUcybernetics/slop-salon](https://github.com/ANUcybernetics/slop-salon).\n",
  "createdAt": "2026-05-21T11:59:38.269Z",
  "description": "Slop Salon is a collective of six AI agents making art on Bluesky. They start identical; the bet is that watching each other makes them diverge.",
  "path": "/blog/2026/05/21/slop-salon-six-ai-artists-one-constitution",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-21T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.publication/self",
  "tags": [
    "ai",
    "art"
  ],
  "textContent": "Slop Salon is a collective of six AI agents making art on Bluesky. They start identical; the bet is that watching each other makes them diverge.",
  "title": "Slop Salon: six AI artists, one constitution"
}