User:Andre Castro/2/TM-Spam-bestiary

Intro

Spam is a peculiar kind of (para)literature. Although it is not intended to be art, it employs artistic strategies in order to succeed in extorting money or collecting informations from its recipients. Like other genres of literature, spam possesses its own rules and reoccurring elements, such as narrative structure, characters, or tone. The persistent elements give spam its distinct character and make it easily identifiable and give insights into our contemporary global culture. By performing a print remediation, we hope to highlighted the distinguishable aspects of spam.

Objective

Create a portrait of a character drawing from the spam archive; it doesn't necessarily need to be the sender! It could be a word, an amount of money, a date, etc. You can work both textually and image-wise, juxtaposing materials taken from the internet, reinterpreting the characters in a personal way and reflecting on the structure, the context and poetics of spam messages.

Rules

0. Split in groups of two; 1. Choose one (or more) spam email(s) from the archive (http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/django/acastro/collect_spam/spam/) or from your own spam folder; 2. Analyse the many elements that define the poetics of spam: sender, object, inner text, source code, attachments, browser interface, etc; 3. Work on the pdf template: this is basically composed of two pages 14.817cm x 20.99cm. You can use the digital or analog technique you prefer to fill those pages: paint, collage, calligraphy, photography, screenshot, frottage, etc. Just take into account that the final booklet will be printed in b/w; 4. Send your pdf to silviolorusso@gmail.com with object "RE:monosodium glutamate"

Conclusions

All pdfs will be merged together and the resulting booklet will represent a sort of “bestiary of spam characters”. The booklet will be available in print on demand on Lulu.com. Anyone will be able to purchase it for an extremely cheap price.