Uncountable amounts of data is daily sent back and forth over the internets. In the middle of the binary stream of organised datastructures are neverending vortexes of randomly constructed sentences. Linguistic white noise. A majority of all spam consists only of a senders name, a title and text content. Nothing else.
No images, no links. Just pure text.
For example: “Donatas barbeau” sends a mail with the title ”Sothink SWF Decompiler is used to caputer movie, parse and export resources from flash movies.”
The mail itself contains only the following text
”On the side of those who want strong copyright protections, Mr.”
From the ordinary day realism to “Ophelia ming”’s emotionally challenging text.
I read the writings X”" stop, do not harm.
however there he very much g. friend,
and you not by scolding.
Hour, there my eyes a holy one saw. And in the sea too st itself.
The following text was copied from a small presentation I wrote for the Spam Poetry project in 2006. The goal of the project was to highlight the possibilities of the automated text-remixnig that the spambots do for a living.
The honey pot
The first goal was to get access to the plethora of spam poetry. For this I set up an email adress which I signed up for various dubious websites with. Whenever I noticed an ad promising “it’s free!” then I just had to sign up with the spam trap. Lo and behold, just a matter of hours later the spam started to arrive. A lot of the content was the ordinary body part replacement/enlargment schemes and lottery chances. But the rest was different. At times very different.
The next part was google and flickr-search images based on the spam poetry. Combining the text and images produced some fascinating results.