Not so long ago I wrote about the poor copywriting quality of spam. I had some ideas about saving and organising all this spam and then using it as raw material for some, digital, artworks. there are, obviously, two very different ways to approach this. You could either use the texts ‘in context’; present the words as spam and see what the audience has to say about spam and the other way around. Or take the words out of context and use the words like Lego. Building blocks that may take on a completely different meaning when place in a different context. The well from which all you building blocks would have sprung would be spam and thus limit your artistic vocabulary. But isn’t it so that in limitations you may recognize the master? Does spam in a different context get a different meaning? yes. Does that make good art? Not necessarily.

Whether presenting words out of context and calling that art has much artistic value is open for debate. Anyway, as was to be expected, spamart is ‘hot’. Dutch artist Loek Grootjans has been collecting and organising the spam he receives (he specifically asked his provider to remove his spamfilter specifically for this purpose) for years. He expects that in about ten years, hew ill have built a unique archive of spam. This, I doubt, since many other people artists around the world will have had the same idea (search engine ‘collecting spam’, there you go) . Whether or not his spam-archive will make art-history will probably depend on how he uses it for building other artworks.

Four examples of how spam is currently being used to create art. Going from ’spam merely provides the building blocks for completely different artworks’ to ‘the nature of spam is at the core of the artwork’.

1. The works of Romanian programmer and artist Alex Dragulescu. Alex wrote an algorythm which he feeds with spamtext. His program than uses these texts as input to create three dimensional images of plantlike structures. He has also built 3 dimensional sculptures based on spam texts.

2. A site where they experiment with ‘recycling spam’ is appropriately called spamrecycling.com. You can make use of spamtexts you have received and turn that into movable objects. However, it’s a shame that there is no added value because of using spam as building blocks there. Dragulescu’s works seem to improve in meaning when you know how the sculptures were created with spam.

3. A better (at least I think so) example of how you can use spamtexts to create art I found on the Flickr page of English illustrator Linzie Hunter. Her works create lovely tension between the sugar coated and pastel coloured typography and the wasteful dollar-driven spam where the texts come from. Never before did we want spam to intrude our personal lives.

4. Let’s return to Grootjans. Merely saving and archiving spam is not all he does. One of the artworks he created using spam is part of the Utopia exhibition I wrote about in my previous post. Grootjans’ minigolf course is a traditional one, but with an addition. All over the course there are little signs that have spamtexts on them. It can be quite difficult to concentrate when someone is shouting stuff about your ‘Johnson’ at you. This work illustrates how spam effects our everyday lives, sucking up energy and time. How annoying it is. So spam is used as spam.

I think good, interesting, provocative and inspiring art is possible on all the above levels (hey, there are even artists that make great paintings about ‘paint’…) it just depends on what you do with it. Perhaps, after this post you might not hit the delete button so quickly anymore. Try and appreciate that someone sent you a little piece of art.

Being a genius is not about very difficult things, but about very simple things. This is especially true for contemporary art. Brilliant art, more often then not, has an end-result that seems very obvious. Stuff about which many people would say ‘my kid could do that’… Think the readymades by Duchamp, the prints by Warhol or the drip paintings by Pollock. Yes, your kid could probably do all of those… if your kid was a genius. Which he or she most likely is not.

I am not a hundred percent Belgian curator Jan de Nys is a genius, but I do consider the outdoor exhibition ‘Utopia’ which he curated for the Cultural Center ‘Scharpoord’ to be a brilliant idea. The exhibition is called Utopia and consists of several works all revolving around the ’suburban ideal’. And what depicts the suburban families pastime more than minigolf? Several European (Belgian, Dutch, German, Austrian and French) artists created their own minigolf track, which are all used as minigolf tracks as well, thereby involving and attracting audiences that would otherwise never show any interest in art. Plus, since the exhibition is situated in one of the poorer areas of Belgian city Knokke, it sort of adds an extra layer of meaning to the exhibition; The ‘have nots’ acting out the suburban dream.

Hopefully the exhibition will travel outside of the Netherlands and Belgium as well.

Contributing artists: Eric Angenot (B), Bisscherouw-Voet (NL), Franck Bragigand (F), Nick Ervinck (B), Sonja Gangl (A), Loek Grootjans (NL), Frank Halmans (NL), HAP (B), Thomas Huyghe (B), Jean Bernard Koeman (B-NL), Fabian Luyten (B), Xavier Mary (B), David Neirings(B), Regine Schumann (D), Lionel Scoccimaro (F), Kevin van Braak (NL), Veronika Veit (D)

I am not going to lie about it. Whenever I read a Coupland novel I think I can write myself as well. I start feeling the urge to document certain contemporary trivia about my life the way he does. And now I have this blog thing… so I can bother you with it as well. How?

Well, this morning when I walked out of the train station (since I work in the center of Amsterdam, going by car is not an option and would be insanely bad for the environment) I discovered two things. First; I am glad I quit smoking a long time ago. When you walk out train stations you see a lot people, a certain group of those people smoke. Those people do not seem to be the type of people that are going anywhere fast. In a lot of cases those people don’t even seem to be the types of people that are taking regular showers. Obviously, this is a crude generalization. Some people that smoke are young, successful, cool, cosmopolitan and healthy. However, their numbers are decreasing and they are none of those things because of their addiction but in spite of it. I took a deep breath of fresh morning air. At least, as fresh as you get it in Amsterdam.

My second discovery is that I really satisfied with the playlist I have uploaded to my first generation iPod Shuffle. My playlist currently features;

• Radiohead - In rainbows (legally downloaded and paid for at radiohead.com, Radiohead rocks)
• New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom (Tip: perfect music for looking at my artwork)
• Fink - Distance and time (No less than brilliant show in Paradiso a couple of weeks ago)
• Pete Murray - See the Sun (Bringing back memories of my stay in ‘Oz’)
• Bonobo- Days to come (Last.fm played Bonobo in ‘Fink’ radio, Ninja Tune is a great label)
• Hot Chip - The warning (haven’t heard the new album yet)
• Kings of Convenience - Riot on an empty street (it’s snowing right now, what better than Scandinavian music?)

And even though I am very pleased with this selection, it’s got some good tracks for reading while on the train as well as for walking though the center of Amsterdam I know it is far from perfect. A perfect mix depends on various variables like where, when and for how long you intend to listen to it. At this point I am not even sure whether or not I will add several individual tracks to the playlist or, as I have done now, select a couple of albums which will make it possible to not listen to a shuffle but in fact an entire album.

Which brings me to a different point. I believe that the iPod shuffle is superior to its bigger siblings, not in spite of but because of it shortcomings. There is not too much memory on a shuffle so you have to really select what tracks you add instead of adding just everything and thereby merely postponing the moment at which you cannot choose what music you’d like to listen to. It’s the same reason why I will never download a ringtone but just use the one my mobile came with. If you start downloading ringtones, you will never be happy and just keep on wanting more and better ones. Leave it to the marketing people. It’s just like the casino: the only way to win is not to play. Furthermore, the iPod shuffle does not have a screen or various sorts of buzzers. It limits your options to the basics, which is such a relieve nowadays.

Hey, just forget about the philosophical question ‘why are we here’. I have got something way better than that for you: I am going to tell you why you are here. And with here I mean; on this blog. And with why I mean; statistically speaking. If you read all this… you’ve got wayyy too much free time on your hands. Or you’re one of those lists-of-trivia fetishists. If you are: enjoy.

If you made it all the way down here… you are scary. And in for some good news. Because what would follow a ‘why are you here’ list? Exactly! A ‘where are you going’ list… but please be patient… the wait is half the fun.

Jpod is Microserfs v2.1! That’s what you get for picking a book for it’s cover and just start reading a novel without any historic perspective whatsoever. A couple of months ago I wrote about Douglas Coupland’s genius novel ‘Jpod’ which I read, how appropriate, on one of those 24hr mega airplane flights. Yesterday, I started reading his earlier sign-of-the-times novel ‘Microserfs‘ about a group of Microsoft coders in the early nineties. In a way Microserfs explains why Jpod is so good. It’s same reason why Bree Hodge makes such an incredible lemon pie… he already had a winning recipe he could follow. And the same as with the pie, he barely changed the ingredients.

Both Microserfs and Jpod are written in the form of a log by the main character. Both characters are in their mid-twenties, mainly live to work in the digital industry, which also means they are doubting their purpose in life, their friends are their -also slightly dysfunctional- colleagues, they fall in love with a female colleague and their parents have problems… And one thing both novels have in common is the fact that Coupland likes playing around in both books with lists and seemingly ‘at random’ words in different fonts and sizes that give you, the reader, some not spoken out loud information about the personality and lives of the characters.

So, if both novels are so much alike, why bother reading both then? Why not just pick one? Isn’t the reason that no one buys a Coldplay album anymore that they’re making the same album over and over again? Why do I want, no have to continue reading after I keep getting this continued deja vu? Or, to phrase this slightly bizarre, what’s the difference between Coldplay and Coupland? Let me explain using a video-gaming analogy.

Coldplay is the like big videogames hit franchise Fifa or NHL by EA Sports; a new version comes out every year that’s basically the same. You get some extra options, better graphics, new names of players, but: when you’ve bought Fifa ‘06 of NHL ‘06 there is really no need to buy any other version… unless you are really, really hooked and are a genuine Fifa collector’. Coupland is more like a shoot em up. ‘Halo‘ was a really, really big videogame. And, apparently, so is Halo 3. The basic idea of the games is the same; you’re a sci-fi marine and you try and kill the other side. The difference with the sportsgames is, that if you’ve played Halo 3 and liked it, but haven’t played the original version (or the other way around) there is every reason to give the other version a go as well. Different tactics, different possibilities… new game…

I guess you might say I have cleared every level of Jpod, the Halo 3 version of Microserfs and am now starting on the original Halo game. I’m actually at that point where I know I’ll love the game, even though I don’t know what’s going to happen yet. The fact that Halo is a Microsoft game simply cannot be a coincidence.

I believe that over 85% of all e-mail traffic consists of so called ‘unsolicited spam’ (what ’solicited spam’ would be… I have no idea). You would think that if an industry is as big as the spamming industry, where you reach so many consumers just waiting to spend their money on stuff they don’t need, that it would employ state of the art copy writers. Writers of spam e-mail can potentially reach an incredibly large audience. With just a little scientific research you could upgrade the response on your spamming from, I guess, o,0001% to 0.001%. This would make you a tremendous amounts of money! I know spam sucks and we really shouldn’t advocate it, but all the other advertising sucks too and that industry brought us beautiful artists and philosophers like Roy Lichtenstein, Matt Beaumont and Paul Arden. ‘Even evil will spawn good’ which sounds like an awful quote from a Star Wars film, but in fact; I just made that one up. I apologise.

For an art project I decided to jump into my spamfilter and read the spam I received (over a weekend, this amounts to over 1500 messages), or actually… I just read the subject lines. I was very eager to be seduced into actually opening an e-mail that I thought would make interesting reading. “Come on, show me those creative, witty, intriguing subject lines that lure me into worlds of pleasure, self fulfillment, comfort and profitability!” Instead, I found creative, lingual carnage.

“‘Do you want a -insert designer name- replica at -insert number-% discount?” How is that going to seduce me? Personally, I am not triggered. Or how about ‘university small business loans’ (you can replace university with government, insurance, national, small business or whatever) as a subject line. That’s not really going to make anyone think that’s an e-mail worth reading, is it? Not even an attempt to target on sex: ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating girlfriend‘ with could appeal to me, being a man - even though I don;t have a cheating girlfriend, as far as I know) became ‘I wanted to get even with my cheating partner’ thus making it even more impersonal. ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that girl in bed’ is turned into the hideous ‘I wanted to find out if I could get that person in bed’. Yep, that makes me curious… NOT!

Personally I think that that is adding insult to injury. Those b#*tards are clogging up my e-mail server and they’re not even taking it seriously. Come on guys; if efficient communication was that easy, would Coca Cola spend all those millions of dollars on making their 3D commercials? Just put a little effort into it, you lazy slackers.

A raw selection of poor copywriting material is being refined at the CultBlender site.

Hello world,
I am afraid,
that I don’t seem,

To have time for you today.

Time just slides down me,
Like water of  a frog,
or a duck,
or a Nokia mobile,
or…

How can you materialize a concept like ‘time’? In previous posts I have often written about the function of art. In interviews with artists I always ask about their motivation and about a message they would like to send to the world, as a person and as an artist. It’s a personal thing, I like artists that have something to say. Artists that want something more than just an aesthetic quality. But other than sending out a message to the world, art can also be very useful in helping us understand the world around us. Let me explain by warping you to another subject by jumping through a wormhole at hyperspeed.

Stephen Hawking is a very, very intelligent man. Some would argue he might even be the greatest mind alive, but I am not in any position to make a comment on that. But besides ‘knowing a lot’ he is also capable of translating it in a way that even normal mortal souls like myself can understand a bit about stuff like ’string theory’, ‘dark matter’ or ‘the expansion of the universe’. Even though this is all very ‘beta science’, all research takes place at a very abstract level. First you have to accept that there is much more going on around than that which we can observe ourselves. You have to accept that our eyes may be very complex, but what they can actually see is very limited indeed. However, we are all very used to the idea that dogs can smell more than we can, rabbits hear more, eagles see more, et cetera. But all this takes place in the safe three dimensions we know.

A very basic step you have to take to be able to appreciate the things that Stephen Hawking writes about is realise that ‘time’ is a fourth dimension we live our lives in. A lot of scientist think it is very probable that there are no less than eleven different dimensions (according to the so called M-theory which forms the basis for all five string theories). All dimensions other than the four we know -and love- are ‘curled up’. And this is the point where you lose me. A curled up fifth, sixth or even seventh dimension? A concept like that is just so far away from everyday life it’s no surprise that mankind came up with religion to explain ‘existence’. I’d like to take a step through a negative energy field in the universe which is needed for theoretical time travel, so we get back to the point where I mentioned how art can explain the world around us.

In 2002 I visited the contemporary art museum MuHKA in Antwerp. When I visited, there was an exhibition of Japanese born artist Suchan Kinoshita. There are some events in your life that you will carry with you all your life and for me, this was one of them. One of the things that had greatest impact on me was her installation ‘Hok 1′. It’s basically just a wooden box in which, on a table there are a couple of glass sculptures in which different coloured oils were running down at their own pace. If you just see the picture it probably doesn’t even look like something special at all. But art, like life, is not something you can experience by just looking at the pictures. The whole presentation of her work, starting with the way she had redesigned the entrance of the museum, prepared the visitor for the experiences she had designed. The most impressive one, for me, was ‘Hok 1′. It made me actually feel time. The different speeds at which the oils were running down in the different shaped glass canisters presented a strong visual representation of something that you are almost never aware of. For a moment I could feel myself moving through that fourth dimension, which was a very weird experience. It was a fraction of a second, but, especially in a posting like this one, I have to say that it could also have lasted an eternity… depending on the observer.

Hok 1 has had a great influence on my life, it has me rethink choices I had made about my professional career and personal ambitions. But it has also helped me in understanding what Stephen Hawking and all his colleagues are talking about. Suchan Kinoshita’s art has helped me understand the concept of time.

One of the better decisions I made during my wanderings around Amsterdam was walking into the Atheneum magazine store at Spui square and buy Juxtapoz magazine a couple of years ago. Needless to say, I have been buying it ever since. Every time I see work of new amazing artists I might never have heard of otherwise. One of the artists I ‘discovered’, even though I would probably have seen his art sooner or later (I’m guessing ‘later’), is David Choe. David Choe is a unique artist with a unique problem; fans keep sending him money.

Some weeks ago David wrote an unusual request on his blog to his fans to stop sending him money (quote: “unless your just being nice, and you want to take care of me and watch me enjoy my life.”). The reason David wrote this because he released a new limited edition print called ‘Falling for Grace’, which was way too popular for its own good. The shopping cart system crashed, everybody got redirected to Paypal who suspected foul play and shut the whole enterprise down. People sent money, but received messages that the thing was sold out even though… it wasn’t. Good news is: the webshop is operating again. So go buy your print.

Oh, and should this posting get you wondering about David and you’re thinking ‘darn, why didn’t those CultBlender guys give me a bit mre information about David Choe…’ Well, we have nothing to declare but his genius and everything you would like to know about him you can find on his site.

For those of you that prefer the non-official stuff (like David probably would), you could go here.

Art advances science, but science also advances art. Science continually provides the artist with new possibilities to create. In my previous posting I wrote about ‘art in 50 years‘, in which I made some vague predictions about ways in which art could develop. There was, perhaps, nothing very spectacular there, with the possible minor exception of the creation of interactive 3D worlds. I must admit, however, that I forgot to mention another area that art and artists are already exploring now. This field may eventually grow out to become a large new segment of the artworld, even though it worries me just thinking about it; it is the field of genetic engineering.

Ofcourse, there are the fairly safe ‘genetic arts projects’ like the ones by the company Genarts, which uses genetic algorithms to create visual effects that you can even fool around with for yourself in a demo version. What concerns me are ‘art’projects like creating a fluorescent green rabbit (like the bunny Alba) or pigeons that produce purple, erm, ‘crap’. The people repsonsible for these projects probably failed to see the scientific value of their work and subsequently filed it as ‘visual art’. It can nonetheless be argued that the artistic value of their work is very close to ‘zero’ as well.

A fluorescent bunny may be in poor taste, and show little respect for the little creature, it is a quite harmless experiment. In about 50 years time, genetic modification will probabaly be a piece of cake. At least for medical scientists. It may very well become possible to use living cells as building blocks with which we can create limbs, organs and other complicated living tissue (big steps are made by using -believe it or not- adapted inkjet printers with which living tissue is actually printed). As with all knowledge, it can be used for both good and evil. Lose an arm in a car crash We’ll just make you a new one? Need a harttransplant? Give us your creditcard details and we’ll bubblejet you a new heart. But what might happen if the technology isn’t well protected?

If gen-tech becomes available for artists, who are not concerned with ethical matters like doctors, we may see the birth of all sorts of new living creatures (not necisarilly creatures that have any form of awareness, but creatures built with ‘living’ tissue). And probably not just animal-like figures. Someone will eventually create something like a ‘living’ house, car or vacuum cleaner and call it art. Undoubtedly the artist will say its intended purpose is public debate (’what does it mean to be alive’), or social awareness (’this is what medical science today is capable of’).

I may not agree with such a development, and I don’t, but I do really think that it is something that will happen. Artists always seek the boundaries of the moral and what is acceptable and when found, they will cross the boundaries. In many cases, that is what makes them ‘artists’. So, without advocating it, I think I have to same ‘bio-art’ as a future development for the artistic world. The new breed of curators may have studied biology.