Built with Processing

BACKGROUND
Everytime when I get access to my e-mail postbox, it is there, the moment of expectation on a new message. It is the question: do I have a message or not. The tension between hope and disappointment lies in the duration of one click – the moment to open the postbox. Again, only bulk emails in the mailbox? Not a day, not one hour passes without receiving new messages from the world of spammers. Of course, they annoy me, I'm not interested in them, I don't read them and I also don't want to be used from them. Maybe one day they become less. Maybe if – at last – no one reacts on bulk emails anymore, if nobody orders pills of Viagra secretly or buys the cheap stokes anymore. Then the Spammer wouldn't have anymore reason to continue her business. But I suspect, this will not happen. So there is nothing else for me than ignoring them or to pay attention in order to work with them.

Bulk emails are messages which were sent unsolicited and which could also be sent in the same style to countless other addressees. They mostly appear in form of advertising messages for dubious products (like Viagra pills imitations or low stocks), as chain letters or masked as official bank requests to submit your PIN. Masked as harmless messages, often with fraudulent intentions, the aim of the spammer is to pass the email filter systems and to smuggle the message into our postbox. In order to succeed spammer use all kinds of formal tricks to handle the methods of email filter software cleverly. This starts with the choice of the words in the subject line which often haven't any reference to the messages' content or even consists of randomly chosen characters for instance. Looking at the content of a bulk email, it is often the same, it is a mystery for the reader. Text are reduced up to a minimum of humans perception or enhanced by useless additional content, like random composed snippets of daily news or parts of novels. It remembers slightly to dada lyrics, but with one important difference. In early ages dada lyric was done in purpose. The reduction of language beyond of the meaning of words to the pure sound of words and texts. „The lyrics of bulk emails“ made up just for get over technical barriers. Dada was done by human with a purpose, bulk email text are „composed“ by machines but without any meaning or purpose in the language. Another popular filtertrick is e.g. to integrate the real written information as text graphics, so that the character recognition of the filtersoftware can't check the content anymore. Insofar talking about aesthetics of spam content insofar, the aesthetics are always depending on how to avoid the current security settings of email filter software. Here, aesthetics are just means to an end, generated by technical necessity, nothing more.

PROCESS
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.