My latest slide show captions have gotten me to a point where I have begun to formulate an idea regarding a new type of digital art project.

I call it “Spam Art” for now, but this may be only a temporary name.

Spam Art is based around the concept of creating art that is inspired by the digitally created texts that SEO programs and email spam bots are constantly creating and broadcasting to the web. These texts, created with the purpose of either cheating email spam filters programs or duping google’s ranking algorithms, are created by robots in order to fool other robots.

The sentences that these machines create usually makes no sense yet are grammatically sound. In essence the programs are developing a Dada-esque language that is ceaselessly evolving through the efforts of anarchic delinquent machines intent on disrupting the daily routine of hard working bourgeois machines. The most bizarre aspect of the whole evolution is that all this is being driven by the awareness that these efforts can help achieve concrete financial goals for us humans in the physical world.

Spam Art projects build on this concept by using as their inspiration texts that at a first glance appear to be gibberish, yet in fact might be perfectly logical and coherent if the reader knows the key required for deciphering the message. The whole thing kinda plays on the idea of key based encryption.

In my pilot attempts to develop this concept I am currently using as my keys slide-shows of captioned photos accompanied by HTML texts that are based on my stream of consciousness as I walk through my daily routine. Obviously there is no real limit to the types of keys that could be developed..

This concept is really in its infancy but an example of its execution are my last blog post and especially the twitter used to promote it:

“Banqing on Genzyme’s support Abraham Obama is now grating weird dogs at a SOWA art installation. Or not… http://hellotxt.com/l/I9aM - : )”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the concept and to see your Spam Art creations so start spamming…
: )

Mike
PS
Just in case - I just bought SpamArt.org…

PPS
Thanks to the comment from Jeroen I learned about the amusing activities of the The Spam Poetry Institute, “….an organization dedicated to collecting and preserving the fine literature created by the world’s spammers….” -check them out to read some of the finest nonsensical poetry ever created by machines.