There may be some among you that have ever sent an actual letter (which is sort of like a printed e-mail). What I remember from letters is that you’d never write at the bottom that you couldn’t be held responsible for the contents of the letter et cetera. As a matter of fact; I never end a telephone conversation with anything like that either. The disclaimer is typical for e-mails. It’s understandable that such a statement is needed, but it is quite bizarre at the same time.

Today, I received an e-mail from someone working at one of our government offices and a sentence from our official governmental disclaimer caught my eye:

“The State accepts no liability for damage of any kind resulting from the risks inherent in the electronic transmission of messages.“

And I find this highly intriguing. Until now, I was never really that aware of the fact that that are inherent risks involved in electronically transmitting messages. Fortunately the State has brought this to my attention. I think I will take precautions of some kind. That’s important, since it’s also made very clear to me that, when damage occurs, of any kind I might add, as a result of one of these inherent risks, I may try to hold the State accountable, but it will accept no liability. None. Not even the tiniest piece of liability will be accepted when I encounter any sort of damage, no matter what the nature of that damage may be, when it result from the inherent risks in electronically transmitting messages.

If you are extremely offended by this posting and suffer emotionally, I must point out that this is considered a message, that is being electronically transmitted to you and, given that there are inherent risks to reading electronically transmitted messages, my State will no accept any liability whatsoever for it. Well, they’re not a part of this small electronic communiqé, so I’m guessing you don’t really mind. You’ll just hold me accountable.

Are the contents of these ‘electronically transmitted messaged’, also inherent risks from which damages may result? I mean, there are always inherent risks to any form of communication of ‘message transmitting’ , electronic transmission included. In other words, is the focus of the disclaimer on ‘transmission’, ‘messages‘ or ‘electronic’ or is it spread out over the three equally?

Even though I guess I understand what the disclaimer means to say, but it could mean so many things that I am actually thoroughly confused. I will spare you the more bizarre questions flying through my head right now, but I think I need to lie down for a minute. It wonder if the State will accept liability for emotional damages caused by the electronic transmission of disclaimers..

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.

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.