David Chien, a Houston-based installation artist, has created a series of works for viewing online called Spamgraffiti.
Each “environment,” as Chien refers to his works, represents a single e-mail account and the unsolicited commercial e-mail it receives. The e-mails are graphically manipulated so the type fonts are oversized and the graphics are displayed on top of one another in splashes of color.
“Each environment is created by spooling through one email account and visually articulating the spam on a series of layers,” says explanatory copy on Chien’s site. “Newer spam appears above and slowly filters out older spam below. As the rate of spam increases over time per account, the page itself appears less and less like the previous generation.”
The pages are reportedly updated every five minutes.
Chien’s installation appears on the heels of a show of New York-based artist Graham Parker’s works made out of e-mail spam in Baltimore’s C. Grimaldis Gallery.
Parker, however, makes prints and newspapers out of his spam.
Parker reportedly likes to have the broadsheets printed the night before his shows open so visitors to the gallery will recognize the messages as e-mails they already have read on their own computers.
Here’s an idea: Chien and Parker could launch rival “spam art” movements. Chien’s purists could be appalled that spam art would ever appear anywhere but online. And Parker’s progressives could argue that, “spam is where you find it … no, where you create it, man.”
Chien’s online installation can be viewed here: http://residency.glasstire.com/spamgraffiti/
