At last, junk e-mail good for something
Instead of just cursing the steady assault of e-mail in their inboxes, a trio of artists have put unsolicited e-mail on parade. They've even found poetry in it.
"Reimagining the Ordovician Gothic: Fossils from the Golden Age of Spam" considers how future historians might see us if the only window into our culture they had was a vast collection of junk e-mail.
There are back lit flow charts, dioramas, a pile of pornography.
A classification scheme, true to the paleontological theme, divides spam into such categories as Real Estate, Urgent Messages, Work at Home, Goods and Personal Appearance.
The three 25-year-old artists scrawled excerpts from e-mails graffiti-style over an entire stairwell and filled suitcases with the goods advertised in spam to represent the medium's empty promises. Diet pills and house blueprints both feature prominently.
"Spam is something an enormous number of people end up having in common," said Daniel Greenfeld, who collaborated with Mike Rosenthal and Jesse Jarnow. "My father understands very little about computers, but he understands what it is to get spam. He understands what it is to be annoyed by this onslaught."
