Spam, Porn and Art
An exhibition of digital art that reclaims the promise-laden subject lines of spam emails
Save As is an exhibition of prints created by digital mapping them into large-scale pornographic forms that probe the intersection of sex and commerce on the Internet. The images are created using a custom-written algorithm that combines junk email with erotic color palettes. The result is a hybrid between spam, porn and art.
The technology used to generate the images is a mashup of AppleScripts that talk between Mac Mail and Adobe Photoshop. Each image is composed of between 8,000 and 40,000 emails that were collected between 2002 and 2006. Up close the emails can be read, from a distance the email subjects blur into their erotic form. A total of 8 works were exhibited at the show, 4 of which are published here. Additional works are in progress and several of the prints are still for sale.
