SpamScape, 2019
Video installation with 2 screens, computer and custom software
SpamScape is based on the proliferation of words commonly used in the electronic mail spams. The spams are these advertising messages, not solicited and sent massively via emails. Interestingly enough, their number is huge and they would represent something like 90% of the worldwide electronic traffic. Moreover they are generated by robots which would very much like to sound like human beings because if they do, their messages would precisely go to your email boxes and not directly dumped in your trash bins. Those bots use lots of technological tricks to sound like Humans, which reminds me of course of the Avant-Garde and experimental writings by Alfred Jarry, Marcel Duchamp or other representatives of lettrism: swopping or switching letters in a word, playing with typography, capitalizing print characters, generating spelling mistakes or cutting up textual fragments. All those efforts to convince other robots (firewalls and spam filters) that the messages in question have been written by human beings, and not produced by machines. It is the day-to-day struggle between Man and Machine-pretending-to-be-Man to produce more fakes, fake medicines, fake rumours, and genuine rip-offs.
17 окт 2024
