Spambox

I’m nobody special, just someone fed up with hating spam and wondering if there is anything ordinary people can do about it. And then I thought of what the Dalai Lama said about attachment being the source of our suffering …

And thus was born the Spambox project, an ongoing investigation into ways to use spam to postive ends.

I began with an experiment in culture-jamming; based on the observations by Bryon Gyson and William Burroughs on the effects of turning a signal back on the source as a means of revenge, I invented a process to distill a Markov Chains analysis on an arbitrary block of spam messages, and then invert the process to generate short spam-concentrate prose automatically posted to a free blogger.com website

There is an extra jab of culture jam on the Blogspot site: I added AdSense – if the keywords in spam emails are meant to turn a profit over dangling dreams before the desperate, Today’s Spam then dangles those same words back in front of them, providing an attractor for their own advertisements! Unfortunately, the AdSense tends to match the posts with anti-spam vendors, which is good because those folks do a good service, but I’d sort of hoped to be funded by the spammers themselves :)

Part of the language experiment is also to see if the essence of the spam wikk change over time, and I suppose it is not surprising that it does! The topics and style of the postings reflect the current themes of live spam (spam is, after all, the expression of living creatures trying to maximize their gains!) I had inadvertently created a window into our culture, and a window that, as far as I could tell, all other artists were ignoring. Here was this vast and inexhaustible resource screaming our dreams back at ourselves, and yet in hours and hours of searching Google and other sites, the only “Spam Art” I could find was simply holding up particular examples of spam as the artist’s choice of an exemplary sample – such a strategy cannot cope with the flux of the messages, and that strategy is static, failing to show how spam grows and adapts to our culture.

This was all very amusing and interesting in a neuro-cognitive way (peering into the rorscharch text, we see what our minds assemble, not what is there, like seeing the Face of Jesus on the wall of the donut shop) and appealingly explorative in a dada sense, it was still not really compelling for me.

So I set out to see if I could transcribe the generated spam-concentrate into unobtrusive ambient musical sounds.

What joy! Instead of harsh ugly spam grating against my ego every time I sat down to read email, what if instead there was a gently lilting meditative aura of sound around my computer, each one unique, each varying as the day’s spam? Language is lexical, music is lexical, it only remains to find a mapping between them.

And this lead to the “Saturday Funny Pages” as I affectionately call them, the typo-poster image generated from the past week’s SpamToday as an anchor to an ambient electronic composition generated from the same spam repository.

Now I was engaged. Now when I sit down to my emails, I am involved with my spam, I dare not lose a single piece of it! Noise has become the source of signal, a prelude to some great what-is-going-to-happen-next!

I encountered one other generative audio-spam service online, Spam Radio, where there is a very ordinary techno soundtrack beneath a droll robot voice reading whatever best-picks of spam they have. This was neat, and has been covered in the media, but face it SR, you can’t keep up; spam will overtake your robot and melt him down! Spambox, on the other hand, can say “Go ahead, make my day!” (or words to that effect) because more spam just means a better sampling in the Markov chains!

the historical archives of Spambox compositions can be found at DMusic.com where Spambox is currently the sixth most played experimental electronic composer.

btw, as an aside, the notion of mapping events to sound is a long and noble tradition, and a highly effective means of monitoring. I can imagine a scenario where highly complex machinery could be more efficiently monitored if it used Spambox-like generative algorithms to produce gentle ambient music that, when it changes, would be instantly perceived as something gone amiss. There was ample research done into this in the 1950’s and 60’s. Spambox does have commercial applications :)

Spambox also has installation applications: I envisage a system where we have a gallery installation of a Spambox machine connected to speakers and a video display; the hosting gallery provides only one email address exposed on the gallery website.

• the first day, it is silent
• the second day, there may be enough text to make a sound, compose a frame, print the received email to the console
• day by day the frequency continues at minimum data-point thresholds until the images and sounds are more or less continuous
• the floodgates are then open, distilling exactly as much spam as has arrived since the last frame/composition was seeded.

All spambox compositions are licensed in the Creative Commons non-commercial/share-alike