I once owned a Roomba, iRobot’s flagship robot vacuum technology, which would wander around my flat at random hours. One night, while sharing a bottle of wine with my (now) wife and collaborator, Kary Hess, it occurred to us that the Roomba might try to escape one day. Or, what if it wandered off like an adventuresome pet? The Lost Roomba premise was born.

Naturally, we needed to create a flier with a direct call-to-action to engage the viewer. But we also wanted to suggest a creepy narrative undercurrent to reward those who dove deeper.

We created “Gil’s Roomba Hotline” using the Burner app for iPhone. We analyzed the available numbers using PhoneSpell.org, which indicates what a particular phone number might spell. 

By permitting an “extra” digit, or a “Y,” in our case, “707-AI-Purity” leaped out as something with which we could work. Besides the well-known “Artificial Intelligence” abbreviation, the word “purity” had a particular resonance since we had recently seen a documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (Jack D. Ripper’s “purity of essence” monologue being a highlight – “our precious bodily fluids!” – two Kubrick movie references in one).

The next step was integrating the AI Purity concept into the text of the flier. This was achieved using the old acrostic poetry form—the first letter of every sentence spells “AI Purity,” which is echoed by the tear-off numbers below. “Acrostic” would be the first clue offered to those who called the number, which was relayed via computer voice “Alex” via the Free Online Tone Generator site.

Lost Roomba — The Flier

Kary decided the flier would have more verisimilitude if written by hand with a Sharpie pen, which she did. Then, it was a trip to the FedEx Office for copies.

We posted images of the flier in the wild on Instagram and Facebook. The neighborhood’s Next Door online community really embraced it. Calls flooded in—listen here:

The flier even inspired someone to write the Ballad of the Lost Roomba. It later earned a mention in A Bestiary of the Anthropocene by Nicolas Nova, published in 2021 by Onomatopee Projects (an editorially-led public gallery and print shop in Eindhoven, Netherlands — that Roomba got around).