X

The art of spam

Work-in-progress combines a biodegradable Styrofoam-like material with robotics and junk e-mail to create sculpture.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
See full bio
Edward Moyer
2 min read

No, we're not talking about this sort of thing, or this. We're thinking of something a little more high tech.

And so are the three artists behind "Email Erosion," a work-in-progress that combines a biodegradable Styrofoam-like material with robotics and junk e-mail to create sculpture.

""="" border="0" style="border:1px solid #000;">
Credit: Annie Brissenden,
Ethan Ham, Tony Muilenburg

The trio of Portland State University alumni--Annie Brissenden, Tony Muilenburg (a former Intel intern) and Ethan Ham (former live producer for The Sims Online)--has won a commission for the project from Rhizome, the Web wing of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Set for completion early next year, the work will consist of a steel-framed glass box, about the size of two phone booths, that'll contain a block of starch-based foam. Within the box, on each side, will be a "bot" that can move up and down and back and forth and direct a stream of water at any point on the block's side. (To get your head around the bot idea, think of an ink-jet printer in which the paper doesn't move but the spraying unit can travel along the y axis as well as the x.)

The bots will be controlled via e-mail sent by people visiting a special Web page--or by spammers; according to a statement on Ham's site, the e-mail addresses of each bot will be put on mailing lists and in places like Usenet where they'll be easy pickings for purveyors of spam.

"When e-mail is received by a bot," the statement says, the bot "is triggered to either move or squirt water--the particular action being determined by an algorithm that uses the e-mail's content as input data. The bots e-mail a response (after) every e-mail they receive but limit their move/squirt actions to once a day for each address from which they receive" a message.

The water, of course, will erode the foam, and Web cams will transmit the action to the special Web page, where a time-lapse film of the piece's evolution will be on view.

"At the end of the show," the statement concludes, "the remaining foam, if any, is a finished sculpture."

Voila.

Well, considering the amount of spam we get here at News.com, all we can say is, the empty box should be intriguing.