This installation uses the tropes of disco lighting and cast shadows to project poetry created from promising and sly found text from thousands of spam emails. The most poignant contemporary reminder of the gap between what is real and ideal is the internet, where one spends nightly hours on personal searches; and advertisements flutter, pop up and highjack concentrated and intimate moments. Particularly manipulative and passive-aggressive, the title of this installation, Everybody Deserves Love, Even You, was the subject line of an email. Its despondent tone addresses contemporary cultural vulnerabilities, sadness, yearnings and desperation upon which marketers pray.
All spam is about personal allure, the attainment of beauty, love, power or wealth. Everybody Deserves Love, Even You imitates the endless variation of these virtual promises. Various spelling tactics are employed so that recipients understand the message but computer programs do not. The messages are concocted in endless variations: often funny, always bizarre, and occasionally poetic. Reminiscent of the seductive murmur of a foreign language, a sexualized computer voice whispers the text. The overly modulated and controlled cadence emphasizes the pervasiveness and monotony of spam, while at the same time, characterizing and transmogrifying the text.
Viewers bathe in the projected text, inducing a sense of spotlight and performance, and therefore a feeling of love and attention. In channeling text through disco ball reflections, the macho messages are feminized through stereotypical associations of vanity and sparkle. The light touches viewers specifically and personally and is at the same time, mass-produced and mass projected. Mimicking the glow from computer screens, the work deflects and co-opts the bottom of the barrel strategies used by virtual marketers into a joyful moment that straddles the real and the virtual.
By taking on a feminist strategy of using alternate surfaces, claiming disregarded floors and ceilings, the work focuses viewers’ attention on spaces and concepts that are often neglected and taken for granted. In a neo-feminist twist, the obnoxious is ‘made pretty’ through playful colour: co-opting the mostly ‘male’ oriented spam spewings.
Everybody Deserves Love, Even You emphasizes the seemingly permanent ubiquity of spam as a shared experience and universal language – words that are largely ignored but still imbued with the power of omnipresence.
-Anastasia Hare
This installation uses the tropes of disco lighting and cast shadows to project poetry created from promising and sly found text from thousands of spam emails. The most poignant contemporary reminder of the gap between what is real and ideal is the internet, where one spends nightly hours on personal searches; and advertisements flutter, pop up and highjack concentrated and intimate moments. Particularly manipulative and passive-aggressive, the title of this installation, Everybody Deserves Love, Even You, was the subject line of an email. Its despondent tone addresses contemporary cultural vulnerabilities, sadness, yearnings and desperation upon which marketers pray.
All spam is about personal allure, the attainment of beauty, love, power or wealth. Everybody Deserves Love, Even You imitates the endless variation of these virtual promises. Various spelling tactics are employed so that recipients understand the message but computer programs do not. The messages are concocted in endless variations: often funny, always bizarre, and occasionally poetic. Reminiscent of the seductive murmur of a foreign language, a sexualized computer voice whispers the text. The overly modulated and controlled cadence emphasizes the pervasiveness and monotony of spam, while at the same time, characterizing and transmogrifying the text.
Viewers bathe in the projected text, inducing a sense of spotlight and performance, and therefore a feeling of love and attention. In channeling text through disco ball reflections, the macho messages are feminized through stereotypical associations of vanity and sparkle. The light touches viewers specifically and personally and is at the same time, mass-produced and mass projected. Mimicking the glow from computer screens, the work deflects and co-opts the bottom of the barrel strategies used by virtual marketers into a joyful moment that straddles the real and the virtual.
By taking on a feminist strategy of using alternate surfaces, claiming disregarded floors and ceilings, the work focuses viewers’ attention on spaces and concepts that are often neglected and taken for granted. In a neo-feminist twist, the obnoxious is ‘made pretty’ through playful colour: co-opting the mostly ‘male’ oriented spam spewings.
Everybody Deserves Love, Even You emphasizes the seemingly permanent ubiquity of spam as a shared experience and universal language – words that are largely ignored but still imbued with the power of omnipresence.
-Anastasia Hare