Now you can make your spam into a work of art. Forward a spam email to spam@spamrecycling.com. You’ll receive a link to your personal spam recycling Flash web app. You can get as artistic as you want. When you’re satisfied with the way it looks, you can have the spam recycler email a screenshot to you. According to the Quasimondo blog, it’s a test of the Flash 8 BitMapExporter class. Well, it’s a very creative test.

Making art from spam isn’t the only way you can get creative with it. You can also make poetry with it. That’s what Kristin Thomas does. She writes poetry using nothing but the subject lines of hundreds of spam emails. It’s actually quite good. It’s like a close-up snapshot of our wartier fears and fantasies. I say “our”, because most of us worry about looks and finances at least sometimes. It makes you pay attention to the psychological buttons that are being pushed by spam, which is something we all normally tend to filter out automatically, just as we’re trained to close pop-up windows as soon as they open. Here’s a sample:

Size Matters, Baby!

Little Girl,
Big Feet,
Enormous savings
Tremendous growth potential
tiny secrets,
wee-est sleepers
medium build
bigger smile
wider ass than the Hoover Damn!

Little Girl,
Big Feet,
Larger manhood
elephantine change in size
smaller interest
fractional cost
huge drain
Fat savings
smaller payments than ever before!

Little Girl,
Big Feet,
Keep your secrets,
Baby keep your secrets.

You know, if some of this stuff is preserved, twenty years later or so, it might say something about the underbelly of the electronic life of the mind in our time. Sometimes, the things we ignore because they’re so common really say something about our culture. Hey, it might even be fun to make a personal online scrapbook and look back at it some time. I started to do that during the Y2K bug craze. Some day, I intend to go back and make a composite of all the stuff I collected, memorializing a crazy time in a crazy place, a time that was forgotten just as soon as it was anti-climactically over. Remember it? It seemed at the time as if apocalyptic fervor had been channeled into fears about technology and had finally died on the vine. Yet, now we see that was not to be. In 2006, the Armageddoners are just as full of passionate intensity as they could be. The Y2K bug scare was forgotten way before 9/11 happened, but now that we’re living in a post-9/11 world, it seems quaint to look back at it, doesn’t it? It makes me feel nostalgic for a time when people feared something that was so easy to laugh at. But I digress. The point is, the Y2K phase was a slice of life and history - and so are spam emails, believe it or not. Okay, everything is a slice of life and history, but some slices are more telling than others, especially in the hands of an artist or poet, no?

Other Posts Categorized as Flash:

• WOW 3D Physics Engine for Flash - January 30th, 2008
• Flash Player 9 for Linux in the Works - July 13th, 2006
• Flash 9 for Linux - July 1st, 2006
• Sandy 1.0 Beta Released - June 24th, 2006
• Verlet Integration in Flash with Flade Open Source Flash Dynamics Engine - June 4th, 2006
• A Trigonometry Tutorial - June 4th, 2006
• Flash BabyCam - See the World Like Babies Do - May 21st, 2006
• Jim's Flash Bestiary - March 29th, 2006
• Page Flipping Script for Flash - March 18th, 2006
• Tarquin Engine for Flash Webcomics - March 18th, 2006

Other Posts Categorized as Hypermedia Poetry:

• simply7 by Deena Larsen - April 5th, 2006