spam

Video and computer games as performance spaces continue literary traditions of drama and theater, and particularly Brechtian “defamiliarization” and subsequent practices of street / guerrilla theater. Such performance work is one end of electronic literature: delivery to a vast audience, potentially the largest any work of e-lit could have; at the same time, epic failure in the complete disregard for the performance by the game players – the literary performance as nothing more than spam.

In fact, exactly this makes such work literary. This presentation discusses two game “interventions” staged over several years by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University: 1) Coal Dust, a series of agitprop theater performances about resource exploitation staged in MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online; and 2) Beckett spams Counter-Strike, carefully staged performances of Endgame in the tactical shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

Such interventions are critical displacements and performances enacted on the game space and community of CS:GO and LOTRO, but also on the literary works themselves – on the agitprop theater text and its claims, and on Beckett’s Endgame. As “existential spamming” (one name for the overall project), the interventions both insist on a political and contextual “reading” of the game space, but also consume the space through absurd and ineffectual performance – a problematic situation that perhaps defines the literariness involved.

This presentation at ELO 2015 situates these works in terms of literary and dramatic tradition, as described above, but also as a corrective supplement to the existing discussion of computer/video games in e-lit scholarship. “Literary games” are an established area of scholarship. Astrid Enslin’s excellent book sets a precedent for analyzing both artistic works making use of game-like aesthetics and affordances (think Jason Nelson’s games), on the one hand, and games that can claim literary merit, on the other (think Journey or Left Behind). The interventionist projects described here offer a very different engagement with games, and in doing so call attention to a need for greater understanding of performance and improvisation in e-lit.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Zombification describes computational processes of production, addressing the mutable quality of automation. Spam consists of mutating identities. It is continuously and seamlessly produced yet temporarily exists in the network through computation. This temporal existence of the living dead, as I argue, encompasses code automation – an undead and repetitive writing process where a parameters’ value is constantly mutating. However, zombification does not only examine the technical dimension of computational processes. This paper tries to articulate the mutable quality at the coding layer, examining its surrounding forces, such as the interface format of a mail server and an email address, the consumption techniques of email addresses, the parameters and values of a software program, and the repetitiveness and undeadness of writing. Thinking from such material and technical aspects of spam, particularly mutability, we gain a better understanding of spam culture that is associated with its mutating identity, including regulatory controls, loopholes, labour practices, digital consumption and datafication. The computational process of such automated production is part of spam culture that has been somewhat overlooked. Production of spam entails not only automation but also the characteristic of mutability. Through the artwork Hello zombies, the critical and aesthetic possibilities of zombification are demonstrated to address the ever-changing datafied phenomenon of digital culture. Indeed, the idea of zombification could be extended to other kinds of software activities that produce quantified data through automated, mutable and programmable machines for qualitative ends.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Andreas Zingerle, from the University of Linz, visited Digital Culture at the University of Bergen on an Erasmus teacher exchange in week 8 of 2015. Zingerle presented his research on February 16 and also gave a workshop on February 18.

Zingerle writes:

My work focuses on human computer and computer mediated human-human interaction with a special interest in transmedia and interactive storytelling. Since 2010 I collaborate with Linda Kronman as the artist group 'kairus.org'. We have worked with the thematic of internet fraud and online scams, constantly shifting our focus and therefore approaching the theme from a number of perspectives like: data security, ethics of vigilante communities, narratives of scam e-mails, scam & technologies. Research subjects are online scammers, vigilante communities of scambaiters and their use of storytelling and technology.

The practice based research is closely intertwined with the artistic production. We adopt methodologies, used by anthropologists and sociologist, therefore our artworks are often informed by archival research (scambaiter forums, archives of fake websites and scam e-mail correspondence), content analysis (narratives of correspondences between scambaiters and scammers), participation observations (self exploration of scambaiting tactics, ‘419 fiction’ workshops) and field research (artist in residence program in Ghana). Besides the artworks we publish academic research papers related to our projects and through workshops we contextualize our quite focused research topics of the artworks to wider discourses like data privacy, activism and hacking culture, ethics of vigilante online communities and disruptive art practices. In our workshops we also explore how scambaiting skills and tools can be used more generally in media competence trainings or in production of disruptive digital fiction.

(Source: UiB)

Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds. "The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all. . . . here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer's Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure." ~ Craig Dworkin

In this essay we describe and theorize upon a spam data set hidden in the source code of HTML pages at the Bureau of Public Secrets, a website housing English translations of the Situationist manifestos and communiqués.

We attempt to build upon a fruitful coincidence: what happens when internet interventionists, “code taggers” on a lucrative Spam mission, meet interventionists of the analog era, Situationist "wall taggers”? The textuality of both groups is aimed at reaching efficiency in a networked structure, be it socially or algorithmically coded; both engage a material and performative inscription so as to activate their discourse (i.e. to make it more efficient).

We witness the action of a mode of writing modeled on graffiti and following the Situationist axiom: “Slogans To Be Spread Now By Every Means.” By focusing on the comparable gesture of verbal propagation (slogans and spam lexicon as social viruses) and the instructional performativity of these texts, we trace a set of theories based on the fiction that Spammers and Situationists have appropriated one another’s tactics.

(Source: Authors' introduction)