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

Introduction

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. These persistent elements give spam a distinct character and make it easily identifiable, but also serve as insights into our contemporary global culture. By performing a print remediation of spam, we hope to highlight some of its distinguishable aspects.

Objective

Create a portrait of a character drawing from the spam archive. It doesn't necessarily need to be the human character. It can be a word, an amount of money, a date, etc. You can work both with text or imagery, juxtapose materials taken from the Web, reinterpret characters profiles and lives, or reflect 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 spam archive (http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/django/acastro/collect_spam/spam/) or from your own junk-mail folder;

2. Analyze the different spam email's elements (sender, subject, body, source code, attachments, browser interface, etc), looking for insight that will help you create the portrait.

3. Work on the pdf template: this is basically composed of two pages 14.817cm x 20.99cm. You can use either digital or analog technique to fill those pages: paint, collage, calligraphy, photography, screenshots, 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 subject: "RE:monosodium glutamate"

Conclusions

All pdfs will be merged together and into a booklet - a “bestiary of spam characters”. The booklet will be available through print on demand via Lulu.com, and will be sent to the participants as a pdf.