User:Andre Castro/2/Transmedial/report

Workshop Report

The booklet

The booklet that you are either holding between your hands or looking at through some form of digital display was a result of the workshop entitle 'Spam Publishing', integrated in the Post-digital Publishing Workshops on DIY publishing that took place during transmedial 2013.

I would like in these following lines to offer an overview of the workshop, as well as reflect upon the motivations that led me to propose doing a workshop on publishing spam. And outputs and questions that resulted from the work and dialogue with the participant.

the workshop description

The workshop premisse was simple one: "create writing and hybrid media publications from your junk mail folder". As stated we wanted to bring participants to look at spam messages as something more than digital junk that fills up our email accounts. We wanted, toguether with participants to look at small and hidden details of messages, at anomallies, at reoccuring elements and investigate them. we decide that a bestiary, a book where these elements could find there space and be properly portraited could serve as good documentation format, but also as a common hub for hosting and materializing the investagations undertaken by the participants in two short hours.

My expectation

From the onset, and due to several reasons I was expecting a positive experience out of this workshop. It was taking place at transmedial. It was a collaboration with the always hilarious and creative Silvio Lorusso. I was going to happen side-by- side with the 'Consent to Print' workshop by Eleanor Greenhalgh and Dave Young, and Florian Cramer's 'Make your own e-book in the epub format'. And lasty, it was about spam, my current area of research.

The workshop also gave a change to articulate my thoughts as to why am I interest in spam, what interesting findings I have made so far, and what I expect to get from spam. It also allowed me to see others making (or struggling to) use, the archive of spam emails I have been compiling and organizing in the last months.

And these were, quite selfishly (I admit that), but good enough reasons to consider the workshop as fruitfull and productive.

==Working with Silvio opened up some doors.

But besides them other two reasons, made me walk out of the workshop room and write these lines with a smile across my face. One of those has been the possibility to collaborate with Silvio Lorusso. Silvio brought a good dose pragmatism 'Let's do it! Yes, a booklet!'. Also he contaminated all of us with his interest in remediation of digital materials to analog forms, or more generaly from one form into another. What changes does the content undergo when a translation from one container to another takes place? Is our view upon the content transfomed? And under this particular context, will we see other faces to spam if it is remediated by print. Will print emphasize certain aspects of spam and relinquished others?

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==Participants Then a third part of the equation - the participants - came into the play. Enthusiasm and initiative were bursting throught the group.

• Everyone seemed to have a slightly different reasons to be in the workshop, but common to most was an interest to get bellow the surface of the unsollicited emails destined to the junk folder. Who are the people sending the emails? Why did I stop receiving penis enlargement emails all of a sudden?

The participants started working by trying to find spam emails where something arouse their interest. After a few minuts of research each group had found its spam terrain.

• Botnet for sending spam.

By searching Russian web-forums, onion links, eventually arrived at some individual, who advertised access to a bot-net that could be used to send email to large numer of address. He only had to be contact through his ICQ number and payed. Don't yet, how far they go, but the group's aim was to getthe botnet spaming the booklet resulting from the workshop.

• The history of a lottery winner

Lottery winning emails I currently quite common. Therefore one group decided to dissect them and investigate aht they could find from these emails. It happened that one of the figures often metioned in these emails has been a lottery winner in the UK. Apparently he is willing to share some of his fortune with others. The group decided to collect all the evidences found under a collage.

• Daughter of a Jihad soldier.

Another approach was to investigate on email sender on facebook. She was the daughter of Jihad leader, and upon a search for her on facebook, I strange profile was found of a girl wiht not many friends and a heavely distorted photo. It happen that the same name, and variations of the same pictures were giving face to different profiles. Participants were expecting some friendship acceptance and messae exchange with here. We are axious for the next episode.

• Puzzeled about Viagra adds.

This group decide to dig into the inbox, going back to 2007 and findout what spam stood there. They were found out a number of viagra adverts. All using the same layout: a colorfull text-box with misspeled viagra in capitals. And the bottom of the email, there was in very small font-size a paragraph of text that seemd to make absolute no sense, it metioned something about sisters and aunts, and some feminine names. Upon a quick search that this was fragment of War and Peace by Tolstoi - an example of Spam Lit, a spam technique where literary texts are introduce to fool the spam filter into thinking that it a friend with some literary inclinations just decided to email some recent prose. the group decide to use the viagra advert layout to sell the book used to produce the non-sense text at the bottom. I am sure soon these beautiful adds will cover bookstore windows, trying to sell us books by Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho.

• The composite nonsense

another group decided to focus on a strange email they had received some time ago. It consisted on compiste words that made no sense, either as a whole or as seperate parts. The group choose on these and investigate its possible definition, based on its component parts. If not on Oxford dictionary, Wiktionary must take in this new, spam-born term and have it as word of day.

Conclusion

The approaches and questions brought by the participants, made the workshop, and hopefully the resulting booklet quite interesting and dynamic. There two topics the I retained from it think will be feeding into my future research. 

archeology of spam - shall we preserve it?

One of these topics can be summarized as the archeology of spam. The trend changes spam undergoes. These seem to be quite sudden, drastic and global. Why did we all of the sudden stoped receiving penis enlargement spam? How come did we all felt that change? Does it mean that great part of spam is centralized, being produced by (a) small group(s), who happen to be in aware of one another? Or is simply the appropriation methode that is so widely employed that if a few sources stop producing a certain genre of spam, the remaing will by consequence also change? And is it important to register this changes? Does the evolution of spam has some value of for culture? Is it that important internet folk cultural product that it asks for our preservasion effort. What does make such question arise in my mind? Is it the fact that it is an authorless cultural production, created with the intent to extort money from its receives that makes me disregared as a cultural product worth our preservation effort?

global appeal of spam

the other is the global appeal of spam. why are so many people curious about spam? Wouldn't it be expected that most of us would treat this text as internet junk that needs to be trown out? But there is something to spam that hooks most of us to it. Perhaps is the fact that seemingly intimate and confessional email is entrusted for us to read, as a result of our good will and honesty. Of course we all see this as a fiction, but could it be that we half-believe in it? That we embark on a suspesion of disbelief beacuse we want to be told a story, specialy one where we are also characters, that happens in distant lands and involves rich and dangerous business? Is it spam fiction told through email?

To finnish off I'd just like to thank the participants of the workshop, Silvio for making a head dive into this crazy project, Florian for having invited us to tkae part in Post-digital Publishing program of transmedial2013, and Piet Zwart (in the human forms of Leslie and Simon) for making it possible for us to come here.