User:Andre Castro/2.1/semniar-2012-12-14

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The tutors considered your proposal and presentation, taken together, fulfill the assessment criteria.

Division

You seem to be divided between

  1. Making a generative system and
  2. Making an art piece that uses the form, structure and grammar of spam and which will require more intervention from you – these are two different possible outcomes.

Main points during discussion

Below are the bullet points made during our discussion that may help you untie the different elements

  • The questions that remain are: How are you going to make the bots agents that introduce individuals and successfully invite collaboration between them?
  • Are you going to spam (literally hit millions) or use spam as a form of para-literature machine? The tests you did were to a small sample known to you. So you have a choice about how you want to scale it: you can spam for real and get the bots working or use the language, protocols and mechanisms of spam to make a ‘meta spamsphere’ or fictive frame which you have more control over and which is of a smaller scale.
  • We talked about your project as an opportunity to ‘re-value’ spam. Keep this in mind. Explore the traditions within LIterary criticism of the 're-valuation of texts.'

Need to differentiate

There are three areas you need to differentiate in order to give the project clarity:

  1. The elevation of the cultural value of spam (spam as a form of literary critique)
  2. Spam as a network of texts which has a structure running through it
  3. Consider the forms of enacting spam (through your own performance, through sampling existing texts, through co-authorship and automatic generation)


Other notes (to unpack during tutorials)

  • Consider spam as a form of para-literature, which is part of a folk history and net of stories that has not yet been mediated or digested. This makes a form of ‘latent literature’.
  • Spam text has a distinct grammar, form and mode of address.
  • Re-writing e-mails as a form of play which allows for complexity

On your progress in the course as a whole:

there is an admirably clear connection between your practical work and your theoretical studies.