lovely spam

BACKGROUND

URL: http://www.lovelyspam.net

Lovely spam deals with the daily incoming amount of bulk emails of one specific email postbox. Thereby only such messages are considered, which has been already tagged as spam by the email provider. I developed a programm in Processing that – as soon as a new message arrives on the email server – first analyze and then transform each incoming bulk email into a typographical image. The picture of each individual message is fitted into the overall picture of the already existing messages. It arises a growing text sculpture, that changes constantly, controlled by the receiving and disappearing of the messages. The representation of each bulk mail will be visible on screen just for a limited time of 14 days. During this time the image of the message will be changed.

Little by little characters disappear and the message gets fragmented. Literally, it goes to ruin, very slowly and bit by bit. Finally, after two weeks, the message disappears completly from the screen, but not only visually, it will be deleted on the emailserver as well. If you look at bulk emails under terms of content, the portion of useful information is negligible. Address data as well as content are mostly faked or covered up. Only links contain relevant information, they can be seen as the only reference to a presumed real sponsor or to an existing product, often they are just the only useable information for the receiver. In the visual process they get processed special. In contrast to the decomposing of the remaining message, the links always persist unfragmented as traces to the net.

As a result of the messages' decomposing, the links as constant information come to the fore more and more. The textscultpture of lovelyspam is horizontly orientated, this axis represents the period of one calendar month. Bulk emails receiving at the beginning of a month will be shown on the left side of the screen. The older the month, the further to the right the graphic will appear on the overall image. As an indicator to the assumed content of the message, the emailtext will be analyzed for specific keywords. These words belonging to different categories, which result from the currently most common topics of bulk emails like gambling, porn and potency pills, stocks, job offers, watches and software). Each category will be represented by a specific farbcode, news, e.g. will be identifiable in the big picture by its red colouring.