I have been invited to participate in an exhibition on Nordic net art, which is currently taking place in Finland.
My contribution to the exhibition is a work from 2003 called Greatest Hits! which is an animated projection of my favourite 365 spam subject lines collected from tens of thousands of junk mails through a period of 5 years.
The idea behind the work is to highlight the characteristic laconic, intimidating and sometimes playful language that has been authored and developed by anonymous spammers in order to 1) penetrate spam filters and 2) lure naive recipients into spending money.
Greatest Hits! offers one way of collecting, archiving and studying spam's presence while suggesting that we may find some poetic qualities in our daily amounts of unwanted e-junk.
Greatest Hits! is updated continuously, offering a mix of classic as well as up-to-date spam subject-lines.
Visitors to the exhibition in Finland, can also get their very own spam T-Shirt with text-imprints from GREATEST HITS! All they have to do is bring 3 pieces of spam subject lines from their own mailbox and put them up on post-it notes.
