White Trash by Barbara Hashimoto

American artist Barbara Hashimoto works with junk mail in her provocative and extremely popular installations. To date she has created the Junk Mail Experiment, Junk Mail with Grand Piano, Junk Mail Landscape and Junk Mail Xmas art installations. Barbara said she spent one year hand-shredding the collected junk mail, resulting in 3,000 cubic feet of shredded material.

To me, Barbara’s piece symbolizes the overload we all feel in our lives—being smothered by literally mountains of paper junk mail, office waste, and SPAM email. Her piece is a visual representation of the waste to which we all contribute—knowingly or unknowingly. For me, becoming part of the Privacy Council is my first step towards taking back that mountain.

-Michelle Amos

First, consider Janet Nelson, whom we learned about via Art News Blog. She’s behind the “A Planet Named Janet” blog, and she uses spam subject lines to create single-panel comics. The series of cartoons, called “Innocent Spam,” reinterprets spam subjects in more family-friendly, hilarious ways. As Janet herself says on her page, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all spam were innocent?” She places the cartoons into her blog periodically, so be sure to visit her site if you’d like a few laughs at the expense of clueless spammers. 

Also, check out Linzie Hunter and her series of Spam One Liners. We found this artist through Art News Blog, as well, and her use of spam subject lines is just as entertaining and creative as Janet Nelson’s. Linzie is a U.K. artist who turns spam subject lines into colorful, playful postcards and prints. She recently released a book of her creations, called Secret Weapon: 30 Hand Painted Spam Postcards (link goes to Amazon.com, where the book retailed for $9.95 as of 1/4/08). According to her bio on Amazon.com, she enjoys traditional print-making and book-binding when she’s not creating digital freelance artwork for a variety of clients (or making beautiful pieces of art from the unsolicited emails in her inbox).

Finally, don’t miss Alex Dragulescu, a computer artist who grows digital ”spam plants.” As we learned from both Alex’s site and CNET, Alex created algorithms that analyze the data and text contained within spam email messages and then create plantlike artwork from the findings. The spam plants expand and develop based on the spam that comes through the system, a process that Alex notes can serve to illustrate how technology changes art. As he told CNET, ”My efforts (have been) to expose the ubiquitous forms in which data and technology are both actively and passively shaping the ways we perceive and construct ourselves and others.” And for Alex, it all started with the spam messages that annoy and frustrate the rest of us. He claims that spam led him to see text differently, and the artistic creations that bloom from his algorithms are delightfully unique, thanks to spammers trying to unload everything from shady prescriptions to knockoff watches.  

With the rest of us struggling to handle the onslaught of unsolicited email messages, it’s good to know that some people are turning the annoyance of spam into creations of beauty, humor and art. So the next time you shudder at the thought of your email inbox, maybe you should consider buying some paintbrushes or grabbing a sketching pencil and unleashing your own creative side.

Sources for this article: A Planet Named Janet, Art News Blog, Linzie Hunter’s webpage, CNET, Alex Dragulescu’s page