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

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

Division

You seem to be divided between

Making a generative system and
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.

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.'

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

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

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

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