Spam Sense
Published by Christy Dena June 16th, 2005 in HCTI, code, Text Art.I know we all receive spam, and that the chunks of text are not perhaps great examples of Text Art, but gee I find some of them interesting. A paragraph of text is often sent, with no coherence, to fool the spam filters that sense is present by the occurance of a certain amount of verbs, nouns, adjectives and conjuncts. Take this recent ‘work’ delivered to my inbox:
Hello,
and startled.low vitality, came straight to business.Then: Fetch him along, he said.do - the very thing Don Diego does not wish you to do. You must notapostrophized his prisoner.dispose of those defences. He proposed that the French ships shouldHe discarded his feathered hat, and covered himself with a steeltaverns of Tortuga, keeping company that in his saner days he hadhis vengeance. And he chose a moment when there were no ships ofWere I General of the King’s Armies in America, said he, I shouldflanks emptied themselves at that point-blank range into the hulls ofThe Deputy-Governor looked round and met the lowering hostileCahusac shook his head. A Dutch brig! said he. Impossible!happened, and when Levasseur was killed.in his cabin. But you, his son, may convey all this and some otherYou are not to suppose that this command was dictated by any sense
Bots sometimes spew out such groupings (due to a mishandling of multiple sentences for instance) but I read a spam text differently to a bot one. With the bots I know how the muddy grouping got that way, but with spam there is some mystery. I imagine a large assembly-line with whirring robotic arms that swivel and plunder words from a pile of encyclopedias, a pile of fictions like ‘The Singing Detective’, a slither of ‘Vogue Magazines’ and a sneeze of propaganda and junk mail. I giggle at the thought of a spam creator carefully choosing texts for collection by a truly anarchic cut-up method process. I cannot help but wonder how the words came together; and if sense is present, if it is the result of artifact or emergence? If I may quote from my freely offered/rudely imposed micro narrative:
But you, his son, may convey all this and some otherYou are not to suppose that this command was dictated by any sense
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