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[- spam does dada, dada does spam.
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By saul, Section whatever...
Posted on Fri Jun 20th, 2003 at 06:52:11 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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Have you noticed those strange little unpronouncable words in the subject lines and bodies of your spam?
Is this just the latest devious trick to avoid automated spam filters, or is the 'spamming community' ;) getting in touch with it's dada/concrete poetry cultural heritage?
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Legislation planned for October this year will make spamming illegal - although the proposed regulation mechanisms are still hazy to say the least (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3005757.stm).
So as the spam shakedown approaches, are we in danger of loosing a valuable and unlauded cultural artefact?
In the mailing list wars of the last few years prolific posters of ascii-art and tangental, vivid musings (you know them: integer, mez, fmadre, portculus, sondheim et al.) have often been labelled 'spammers' and excluded from lists where they and their detractors have caused merry hell with endless arguments about censorship.
The form and tone of their emails (and in some cases, the self-promotional intention behind them) bears much resemblance to the spam flood - although it's re-contextualised (elevated?) as art and usually directed at communication hubs such as mailing lists rather than mass-emailed to everyone@everywhere. They need public spaces to flourish, whereas the spammers seem to try to infiltrate private channels (the 'enlarge your penis' shop might not get so many visitors if it was prominently situated in the shopping mall I suppose)
The cascade of strange ASCII characters and fractured, desiccated language from the art-spammers (I'm not using that term pejoratively here, I actually quite like them) could originate from the garbled, badly-implemented character translations of pre-unicode days. Spam sent in one character set would appear in another linguistic context all spazzed out - full of puncuation and obscure characters. So the spam-artists appropriated this aesthetic - merging it with the forms and intentions of concrete poetry, dada and other typographic transgressions. To paraphlays an old truism: Art imitates Spam.
But with this latest development in the spam world - the use of random assemblages of characters to fool the spam filters, the appropriation seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Spam imitates Art.
There is clearly an argument for preservation of these cultural artefacts. Florian Cramer has been doing a sterling job of art-spam preservation with the 'unstable digest' (http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/unstable_html/)- now that nettime-bold is sadly out of commission, this may now be the only place left to find nettime's particularly ferocious spam-art culture.
And the real spam? The unmediated low-culture commodity? Where is that being preserved? Who is going to love it now?
There are a number of resources I have collected - please add more:
- Spam Radio - http://spamradio.com
Brainchild of the darq.net network, Spamradio streams the spam it recieves, set to generative music 24 hours a day. Although one of Spamradio's founders Ian Morrison claims they are doing this as a campaign against spam, I think they secretly love it for its dadaness.
- http://pleine-peau.com/ - home of spam art
- nettime interview with Frederic Madre - one of the original spamlovers.
- Splang - http://www.dicshunary.com/view_dict.php?issue_id=20
The 'Splang' Category of the dicshunary.com - a place to preserve the strange little neologisms used in spam subject lines to confuse anti-spam filters.
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