Becoming Fog: Tactical Media, Spam and Obfuscation Seminar, Winter Semester KHK 2018/2019

The Art of Noises (Italian: L'arte dei Rumori) is a Futurist manifesto written by Luigi Russolo in 1913.
In it, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of
the urban industrial soundscape. This new sonic palette requires a new approach to instruments and
composition. We must break at all cost from the restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the
infinite variety of noise-sounds.
Futurism

In this manifesto, Russolo
proposed that the existing
musical notation system was
restrictive and served only to
confine the development of music.
He set out to develop machines
capable of producing sounds
beyond our musical ladder,
thereby enriching our own
hearing with new and exciting
rhythms.
“Our expanded sensibility will gain
futurist ears as it already has
futurist eyes. In a few years, the
engines of our industrial cities
will be skillfully tuned so that
every factory is turned into an
intoxicating orchestra of noises”

The Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern
capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their
works.
Dada 1915 -
Key figures in the DADA
movement included Hugo Ball,
Marcel Duchamp, Emmy Hennings,
Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp,
Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch,
Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara,
Francis Picabia, Huelsenbeck,
George Grosz, John Heartfield,
Man Ray, Beatrice Wood, Kurt
Schwitters, Hans Richter, Max
Ernst, and Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven among others.

Dada was born as a reaction to the horrors of the First World War. This international movement
was started by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. Dada
rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition.
The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain
that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the
words "da, da," meaning "yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name
"Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French–German
dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'

Dada used chance as an outlet for the unconscious mind. The rejection of standards of art.
Dada had no mission.

Situationism 1957 -> dissolution in 1972The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived from anti-authoritarian
Marxism and the avant-garde art movements such as Dada and Surrealism.
The term "situationist" refers to the construction of situations, one of the early central concepts of
the Situationist International; the term also refers to any individuals engaged in the construction of
situations, or, more narrowly, to members of the Situationist International.

As early as 1958, in the
situationist manifesto, Debord
described official culture as a
"rigged game", where
conservative powers forbid
subversive ideas to have direct
access to the public discourse.
Such ideas get first trivialized
and sterilized, and then they are
safely incorporated back within
mainstream society, where they
can be exploited to add new
flavors to old dominant ideas.
This technique of the spectacle is
sometimes called recuperation.

DerivePsychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that examines the effect of the
environment on the emotions and behaviour of people. It explores how different places impact upon
people psychologically. As a movement it emerged from the avant garde movement Lettrist
International, with the commonly-cited originator being Ivan Chtcheglov

Guy Debord
The Marxist theorist Guy Debord is often credited with having done the most to popularise the
theories of psychography. As a founding member of the Situationist International, Debord promoted
the playful and creative aspect of the derive, inspired by the 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire
and his concept of the flaneur (urban wanderer). In 1955, Debord defined psychography as:
‘The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously
organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’

May 1968 general strike, Paris.the Situationists, against the unions and the Communist Party that were starting to side with the de
Gaulle government to contain the revolt, called for the formation of workers' councils to take control
of the factories, expelling union leaders and left-wing bureaucrats, in order to keep the power in the
hands of the workers with direct democracy.

>> Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life", 1974

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)
The Practice of Everyday Life begins by pointing out that while social science possesses the ability to
study the traditions, language, symbols, art and articles of exchange that make up a culture, it lacks
a formal means by which to examine the ways in which people reappropriate them in everyday
situations.
This is a dangerous omission, Certeau argues, because in the activity of re-use lies an abundance of
opportunities for ordinary people to subvert the rituals and representations that institutions seek to
impose upon them.
With no clear understanding of such activity, social science is bound to create nothing other than a
picture of people who are non-artists (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and
heavily subject to received culture. Indeed, such a misinterpretation is borne out in the term
"consumer". In the book, the word "user" is offered instead; the concept of "consumption" is
expanded in the phrase "procedures of consumption" which then further transforms to "tactics of
consumption".

I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships
which becomes possible
when a subject of will and power
can be isolated from the environment”

“I call a “tactic,” on the other hand,
a calculus which cannot count on a “proper”
(a spatial institutional localisation)
nor thus a borderline distinguishing the other
as a visible totality. The place of a tactic
belongs to the other

KDaG_nato+0.55
NATO.0+55+3d, Netochka Nezvanova (1999)NATO.0+55+3d was an application software for realtime video and graphics, released by 0f0003
Maschinenkunst in 1999 for the classic Mac OS operating system. Being one of the earliest
applications to allow realtime video manipulation and display, it was used by artists for a large
variety of purposes, prominently for live performance, VJing and interactive installation.
(documentation by Alejo)

1995 Geert Lovink & Pit Schultz ("the nettime brothers")The name nettime was chosen as a statement against space metaphors such as cyberspace,
dominant at the time.
The time of nettime is a social time, it is subjective and intensive, with condensation and
extractions, segmented by social events like conferences and little meetings, and text gatherings for
export into the paper world. Most people still like to read a text printed on wooden paper, more
than transmitted via waves of light. Nettime is not the same time like geotime, or the time clocks
go. Everyone who programs or often sits in front of a screen knows about the phenomena of being
out of time, time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, bandwidth,
the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as a asynchronous network of
synchronized time zones.

Tactical media denote a form of media activism that privileges temporary, hit-and-run interventions
in the media sphere over the creation of permanent and alternative media outlets. Tactical media are
media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power, ("anger is an
energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation.

Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself’ media, made possible by the
revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to
the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the
wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always
participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.
- ABC of Tactical Media (1997)

Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition. This is both the source their power,
("anger is an energy" : John Lydon), and also their limitation. their typical heroes are; the activist,
Nomadic media warriors, the pranxter, the hacker,the street rapper, the camcorder kamikaze, they
are the happy negatives, always in search of an enemy. But once the enemy has been named and
vanquished it is the tactical practitioner whose turn it is to fall into crisis. Then (despite their
achievements) its easy to mock them, with catch phrases of the right, "politically correct" "Victim
culture" etc. More theoretically the identity politics, media critiques and theories of representation,
that became the foundation of much western tactical media are themselves in crisis. These ways of
thinking are widely seen as, carping and repressive remnants of an outmoded humanism.

What makes Our Media Tactical? In 'The Practice of Every Day Life' De Certeau analyzed popular
culture not as a 'domain of texts or artifacts but rather as a set of practices or operations
performed on textual or text like structures'. He shifted the emphasis from representations in their
own right to the 'uses' of representations. In other words how do we as consumers use the texts
and artifacts that surround us. And the answer, he suggested, was 'tactically'. That is in far more
creative and rebellious ways than had previously been imagined. He described the process of
consumption as a set of tactics by which the weak make use of the strong. He characterized the
rebellious user (a term he preferred to consumer) as tactical and the presumptuous producer (in
which he included authors, educators, curators and revolutionaries) as strategic.
Setting up this dichotomy allowed him to produce a vocabulary of tactics rich and complex enough to
amount to a distinctive and recognizable aesthetic. An existential aesthetic. An aesthetic of Poaching,
tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping, desiring. Clever tricks, the hunter's cunning,
manoeuvres, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. 
Awareness of this tactical/strategic dichotomy helped us to name a class of producers of who seem
uniquely aware of the value of these temporary reversals in the flow of power. And rather than
resisting these rebellions do everything in their power to amplify them. And indeed make the
creation of spaces, channels and platforms for these reversals central to their practice. We dubbed
their(our) work tactical media.

Of course it is much safer to stick to the classic rituals of the underground and alternative scene.
But tactical media are based on a principal of flexible response, of working with different coalitions,
being able to move between the different entities in the vast media landscape without betraying
their original motivations. Tactical Media may be hedonistic, or zealously euphoric. Even fashion
hypes have their uses. But it is above all mobility that most characterizes the tactical practitioner.
The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous
supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines
and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing
because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty.
 
Our hybrid forms are always provisional. What counts are the temporary connections you are able
to make. Here and now, Not some vaporware promised for the future. But what we can do on the
spot with the media we have access to.

The techniques by which the weak become stronger than the oppressors by scattering, by becoming
centerless.
What is TM in short: the critical appropriation and transformation of a preexisting work—be it an
artwork, a commercial billboard, or a political campaign. In the case of tactical media, it is the
media themselves to be the subject of a detournement.
Due do their temporary nature, tactical media do not tend to construct alternative media outlets,
but rather appropriate existing media channels and technology to transform their usage and/or the
popular understanding of their messages. In this respect, tactical media are more akin to other
temporary forms of cultural and political intervention, such as guerrilla communication and culture
jamming.

Sony released the first consumer camcorder in 1983, the Betamovie BMC-100P.
It used a Betamax cassette and rested on the operator's shoulder, due to a design not permitting a
single-handed grip. That year, JVC released the first VHS-C camcorder.

“Video is a, a tool its a weapon and a witness, its all those things. It serves us better than our
memory can ever do because sometimes it gets details that sometimes our eyes miss. Its kind of a
reversed big brother. ‘Big Brother’ was always the state watching the people, now the people can
begin watching the state. and then they wont fuck with us anymore.”
Paul Garrin «Man with a Video Camera (Fuck Vertov)» 1988

Farocki and Ujică Videograms of a Revolution (1992)

Spin is a 1995 documentary film by Brian Springer composed of raw satellite feeds featuring
politicians' pre-appearance planning. It covers, not only the presidential election, but also the 1992
Los Angeles riots as well as the Operation Rescue abortion protests. Famous people were
unknowingly caught on camera with open microphones, the accumulated scenes of spin-doctoring
and power-mongering add up to a devastating critique of television's profound manipulativeness in
the way it packages the news and politics.

Inke Arns, PhD, curator and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein ( www.hmkv.de ) in
Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer
and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe
Inke Arns: NetzKulturen (2002)

Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various
specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book
art, and performance. (CAE simulates a dirty bomb in Radiation Burn 2010).
CAE (Critical Art Ensemble, 1987, Tallahassee)

For CAE, tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any
media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions
and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture. In
its performances, CAE creates various performative identities, such as that of a group of scientists
or a corporation. Instead of using fancy, high-tech machinery they use 'high school lab equipment as
well as common household supplies and groceries', which brings the scientific difficulty down to a
level at which the public can understand and engage with because the worlds of science and
technology in the modern world are 'increasingly privatised'. This playful style, however, contrasts
with the groups numerous books and manifestos which have an analytical focus.

=
Culture Jamming or: guerrilla communicationA tactical form of subversion used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or
subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It
attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of a mass society to foster progressive change.

RTMark: Barbie Liberation Organization (1993)in 1993 by switching the voice boxes on talking G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls. The BLO performed
"surgery" on a reported 300–500 dolls and then returned them to the shelves of stores, an action
they refer to as shopgiving. This action resulted in girls opening their new Teen Talk Barbie to hear
it say phrases such as "vengeance is mine" and boys hearing their G.I. Joe say "The beach is the
place for summer."

etoy: “I must go online” (1996)

etoy.CORPORATION: Toywar (1999/2000)

The corporation Etoys wanted to sell toys online; they were unable to get a registered trademark.
Nonetheless they did business from Etoys.com, but found that they were losing 20,000 hits a day to
the arts group, and customers "hijacked" to the arts site complained about the pornography and
profanity they found there. After attempting to buy the domain name from etoy, the toyseller sought
and received a preliminary injunction on dilution grounds (their mark was arguably being tarnished
by the arts group) at the end of November, 1999. The court imposed $10,000 per day in fines for
continuing use of the domain name. A hearing was set for December 27, but in the meantime an
incredibly well orchestrated counteroffensive was launched. Eventually the corporation both dropped
the suit, paid the arts group's legal defenses, and allowed the two etoys to co-exist in cyberspace
without insisting upon any change in the content of the site.
etoy.CORPORATION: Toywar (1999/2000)

The Yes Men: GATT.ORG (1999-2002)

On June 14, 2007, the Yes Men acted during Canada's largest oil conference in Calgary, Alberta,
posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives.
The Yes Men: Vivoleum (2007)

Dow is the owner of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the chemical disaster in Bhopal,
(1984). An estimated 3,800 people died immediately from the hazardous chemicals and thousands
more were killed by the plume from the UCC plant during the next few days. The Indian government
reported that more than half a million people were exposed to the gas, leading to numerous early
and late health defects. The Bhopal Disaster became one of the worst chemical disasters in history
and the name Bhopal became synonymous with industrial catastrophe.
The Yes Men: “Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility” (2004)

The Yes Men: “Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility” (2004)

On 22 June 2016 a new online store, Share the Safety, was announced. It said that ‘the revolutionary
online store takes its cue from other “buy one, give one” retailers, and customers of
ShareTheSafety.org will have the pleasure of knowing that for each handgun purchased, one will be
donated to an at-risk American citizen in the urban center of their choice’. The site is presented as
an initiative of the NRA (National Rifle Association) in the US, in collaboration with arms
manufacturer Smith & Weston.
The site caused an outrage, but investigations revealed it as a hoax from The Yes Men, playing of
similar trends in marketing and business, as well as obvious hints to the shooting in Orlando and the
response and attitude of the NRA

Eva and Franco MattesThey have been chased from Rome to Canada by the Holy See for their fake website,
www.vaticano.org; threatened by the PSINet Europe Network Abuse Team for the diffusion of a
supposedly illegal book; pursued (and caught) by Symantec Corporation for being the authors of the
computer virus Biennale.py.
They clashed with the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism for the sabotage of an
exhibition, and they challenged and defeated Nike Corporation in a legal battle for a fake
advertisement campaign. They invented an inexistent artist, hacked the first art gallery on the
Internet, invented Life Sharing and voluntarily submitted themselves to satellite surveillance for an
entire year. They have been called media scammers, myth-makers, identity thieves, extremists, as
well as Internet stars, info-dandies and geniuses.

Eva and Franco Mattes: vaticano.org (1998)

Eva and Franco Mattes: Biennale.py (2001)

Eva and Franco Mattes: Reenactments (2007-10)Reenactments of historical performances inside videogames, including Marina Abramovic,
Gilbert&George and Vito Acconci. Anyone could participate connecting from all over the world.

Michael Dieter. Critiques of Tactical Media, 2017Disengagement. One central strand of critique has been directed at questioning the connections
between TM projects and actually existing political movements. Critics like Gene Ray and Sholette
(2008), for instance, have questioned a perceived disconnection between TM practices and conditions
of global precarity, from maquiladoras and export processing zones to knowledge-intensive sectors
of informational employment and the creative industries.
Distraction For a tactical practitioner, media channels are potentially overloaded with user-
generated-content that competes with expressions of political antagonism: how does a TM event
unfold in conditions of information overload?
Capture At the level of infrastructure, the development of mass commercial hosting companies for
blogs, online video and social networking raises significant new challenges for TM due to the
corporate ownership of these platforms, the intensive capture and mining of data and the
preformatted logics of exchange (Stadler 2009).
Google or Facebook exhibit all of the variable creativity once associated with the everyday.
Disorganization this perspective claims that there remains a need to push otherwise short-lived
tactical projects into stable institutional forms: a dynamic that might be described as moving toward
the strategic by developing prototypes, technical protocols, funding models and new techniques of
working.

How much of this is fiction. is an exhibition, involving artists as tricksters and featuring work which
involves the direct use of deception, tricks, hoaxes and hacks. These politically inspired media artists
use trickery and deception to exploit the shifting boundary between fiction and reality in a world of
‘post-truth’ politics.
How much of this is fiction. focuses on politically inspired media art that uses deception in all its
forms. At the heart of the exhibition is the desire to address one of today’s most urgent political
issues: the radical shift in the boundary between fiction and reality in public discourse, in a world
increasingly governed by ‘post-truth’ politics. How much of this is fiction. shows the artist as ‘dark
jester’, as trickster, using a variety of hoaxes, hacks and ruses to reveal the hidden workings of
power structures and the possibility of alternative futures.
As well as acting as a timely reflection on the nature of truth in a time filled with fake news,
misinformation, and tactical propaganda, the show also serves a historical purpose. Many of the
high-speed media interventions showcased in the show are, to a degree, legacies of ‘Tactical Media’;
a cultural and political movement that flourished in the late 90s. Tactical Media was the first to
combine the power of art, the practices of PR and advertising worlds, and an experimental approach
to digital media, to mount hit-and-run interventions in the media sphere aiming to create chaos as a
means of generating political opportunity.
Curated by Annet Dekker & David Garcia in cola w/ Ian Alan Paul (2017, HEK, Framer Framed)

Arabian Street Artists (EG/DE) Homeland Is Not A Series, (2015)

Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud (CH) Zone Interdite, 2006 —Starting with the artistic ambition of gaining our own picture of the world, we discovered certain
blackouts - maskings of our perceptions. When observing military restricted areas, our attention
got blurred. “Zone Interdite” reconstructs the terrain which our reflection has been deprived of

Julian Oliver (NZ), Danja Vasiliev (RU) Newstweek (2011)

Matthieu Cherubini, rep.licants.org (2011)

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Random Darknet Shopper (2014 - Ongoing)

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Delivery for mr. Assange (2013)

Net.personalities such as net.god KIBO, or B1FF, started cults and doppelgangers mimicking their
humorous styles and absurdist content. The recurrence of these persona on Usenet playing with the
rules of communication develops a social and aesthetic side of spam that is sometimes encountered
in contemporary junk email.
On Proto-Spam by Camille Paloque Berges (infomorphs).

Monty Python's Flying Circus (1970s)
Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly
chant "Spam!" over and over again. Canned meat was important after WW II as the United Kingdom
struggled with its agriculture.

My https://monoskop.org/log/ references for this Basisklasse

HistoryMay 1864, when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram advertising a dentist. The
earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message advertising
the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to
393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was
the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, mass email. Reaction from the
net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.

The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message
advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary
Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person,
which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, mass email. Reaction
from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.

History - first recordingsIn the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and
MUDs, who would repeat "Spam" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen.
This was also used as a tactic when insiders of a group wanted to drive newcomers out of the
chatroom so the usual conversation could continue (AOL).
It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the
same message.

HistoryThe word was also attributed to the flood of "Make Money Fast" messages that clogged many
newsgroups during the 1990s. In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English, which had previously
only defined "spam" in relation to the trademarked food product, added a second definition to its
entry for "spam": "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of
newsgroups or users.” Messages that were crossposted to too many newsgroups at once – as
opposed to those that were posted too frequently – were called velveeta (after a cheese product).
But this term didn't persist.

HistoryThe first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team
of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise
immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green Card spam", after the
subject line of the postings.
Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were
hypocrites, claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and
labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals". The couple wrote a controversial book entitled
How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.

Different types of SPAM
Instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web
search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online
classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet
forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam
mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam.

Times Square. Aimed at every one showing up. It makes you familiar with a name or a brand; its
brand advertising. Branding comes from cow branding; in this kind of branding you are like a cow,
you are getting a name burned onto you.
Times Square

Times Square. Aimed at every one showing up. It makes you familiar with a name or a brand; its
brand advertising. Branding comes from cow branding; in this kind of branding you are like a cow,
you are getting a name burned onto you.

2 approaches to advertising.Don Draper of “Mad Men” (George Louis) : Advertising as a craft.
On the internet this became: Chaising you around, targeting you like you are an animal (junk mail).

The advertising were one way and as may people as you wanted.
90s internet portals

90s: pop up adsPop-up ads or pop-ups are forms of online advertising on the World Wide Web. A pop-up is a
graphical user interface (GUI) display area, usually a small window, that suddenly appears ("pops
up") in the foreground of the visual interface.

The costsThe costs such as a loss in productivity and fraud, are carried by the public and by Internet service
providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the volume. The European
Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk email" cost Internet users €10
billion per year worldwide. The California legislature found that spam cost United States
organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional
equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem. Spam's direct effects include
the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of
dismissing unwanted messages. Large companies who are frequent spam tagrets utilize numerous
techniques to detect and prevenstpam.

SakawaA Ghanaian term for illegal practices which combine modern Internet-based fraud with African
traditionalist rituals. The rituals, which are mostly in the form of sacrifices, are intended to
spiritually manipulate victims so that the scammer's fraud is successful. The term Sakawa referred
to specific online scams but has since broadened to include all types of online frauds and scams
mainly targeting foreigners.

Florian Cramer on Jodi.org
4 Nov 2002
Josephine Bosma
july 1998

Maila replies emails automatically
mi_ga, triple-double-u.com (2006)

Anti marketing EGBG counter script (1994)
https://egbg.home.xs4all.nl/counterscript.html

Darko Fritz, fax spam. (2003)
“Please do not send these faxes to us!
We have no interest and we are running out of ink! “

Taeyoon Choi and David Horvitz: Spam Lunch (2015)

Paul Echeverria - Tony Jones. (2015)
The project uses an artist alias to respond to multiple spam phishing requests. Most of the work is
unpublished, but you can access a small sample (other similar projects: James Veitch, Ben Taylor)

James Vetch - This is what happens when you reply to spam

Fabian Hesse - DataClasm (Sending E-Mail SPAM to 3D-Printers)

Camille Henrot. Office of Unreplied e-mails. (2016)

218 spam emails were received over the period of one month. The raw text is printed on screen in
sync with the sonification of the same data, a simple conversion of the character's ASCII codes into
audio samples at 44100Khz. In red are the last 1470 characters that are audible on each frame.
Georgios Cherouvim, Spam (2018)

A Bestiary of
Spam Characters
by
Dave Dawes
Vivian Schlömer
ADARA SALAMAT
noyan
Inga Schlömer
Raimundo Castro
Transmediale 2013
Wed 30.01.2013
Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, Berlin
—SpamPublishi
A Bestiary of Spam Characters (2013)
A booklet resulting from the workshop “Spam Publishing” held by André Castro and Silvio Larusso at
Transmediale 2013, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

My first ‘friends’
Anderson is popularly known as "Tom from Myspace" because until 2010 he would automatically be
assigned as the first "friend" of new Myspace users upon the creation of their profiles.

"Parked domain girl” or “the Expired Domain Girl“ is the standard default photo for a parked web
domain, starting in 2005, has spurred a little online fandom. Dunstin Steller took this photo of his
sister, Hannah Stiller, and tossed it onto his iStockPhoto portfolio. For a few cents, Demand Media
scooped up the photo and was then licensed to use it throughout their web properties. Every time a
website goes dark, Demand Media scoops up the domain registration and parks it, with ads and links
around this photo. The file is usually saved with the name "0012_female_student.jpg".
Stock Photo page of the Parked Domain Girl

WHOSE IS THAT FACE Is it even her own at this point? Is it recognisable by a significant number of
folk? Is this image ubiquitous (enough)? I’d argue the face/image is ours more than hers at this
point. An unintended visual pseudonym for glitches in web-browsing.
Parked Domain Girl

Parker Ito: The most infamous girl on the internet /
/ attractive student / Parked Domain Girl (2010)
Ito asked orderartwork.com, a Chinese company which makes oil paintings on-demand, to create a
series of paintings based on the Steller/iStock/Demand Media image.

Ariane seems to be the busiest stock photo personality of all time. She has been spotted advertising
Google Adwords, promoting Weight Watchers, and on absolutely everything you’ve seen. Ariane is so
ubiquitous, she has probably entered your subconscious at some point.
Ariane

James Bridle: Render Search (2013)I first noticed the Render Ghosts on the hoardings surrounding a new development near Finsbury
Square. On the balconies of some vast, virtual tower, two pixelated figures looked out over a
darkened London, a perfect red-pink gradient sunset behind them. He had short dark hair and
stubble, wore a black jacket and blue jeans. She had a cropped red bob, white jacket, and a purple
knee-length skirt. I didn’t know who they were, but I started seeing them everywhere.

Improve your intellectual property experience on the web, enjoying the beautiful, timeless, cross-
platform watermark of the “embed power-web”. A watermark is forever.
Geraldine Juarez: Gerry Images (2014, 2017)

The rise of the holograms: Carla, Paige, Holly & Libby. TENSATOR® VIRTUAL ASSISTANT are high
quality, engaging and customisable digital signage solution
“The next generation of airport employees”

VentriloquismVentriloquism, or ventriloquy, is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) changes his
or her voice so that it appears that the voice is coming from elsewhere, usually a puppeteered
prop, known as a "dummy".

Horse ebooks - twitter botHorse_ebooks was a widely followed Twitter account and Internet phenomenon. The account was
apparently intended to promote e-books but became known for its unintentionally amusing non
sequiturs in what seemed to be an effort to evade spam detection.

Tay.aiTay was an artificial intelligence chatter bot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation
via Twitter on March 23, 2016; it caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post
inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, forcing Microsoft to shut down the
service only 16 hours after its launch.

Spam Music
I For One Welcome Our New Robot Vocal Cords: Radical Computer Music Robert Barry (2014)

Hito Steyerl - Spam of the Earth. (2015).

Steyerl: Cover of Voyager's golden record with playing instructions and sound diagrams, launched by Voyager in 1977.
Cäsper: “the first message to the aliens will immediately followed by an unsubscribe request”

A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad
server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is
intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser.
On the internet is now more choice than television: the audience is more fragmented. As a result,
advertisers had to choose how to follow them.
90s: banner ads: broadcast adds in a narrowcast world

Standardized sizes of banner ads…

While many still belief that the internet is free, in reality, in exchange for using the internet we are
sending information on what patterns and websites we are visiting. We send data points; what we
want, what we buy and what we do next.
This has resulted into a next revolution of advertising: programmed or targeted advertising.

Different forms of ‘communication’ are happening when you call a website, and within a call many of
your data points are captured & collected: what website, the ip, the user, geography, web browser.
When a websites drops a cookie, it becomes possible to track you.

TRACKING: Don Drapers "prime time" is now all the time.Before Facebook, people had often used aliases (or handles). Platforms such as Facebook brought the
"real identity”-"real" people, friends, photos and images- to the internet. The user has become
‘someone'.
Today Facebook collects and analyses the messages you write even the ones you decide to delete.

When you are active on the internet, your preferences and choices are indexed and a profile is
created. Algorithms buy and sell targeted advertising, replacing traditional ad executives. The Mad
men have become the “math man”. They extract data points such as: location, time date, recent
purchases: what kinds of things you might be interested in, based on the media you are consuming
online. What sites are you visiting, what things we are watching.
Finally, advertisement space is "auctioned" in the time of 300 miliseconds. Now you are targeted.
I just came back from Chili yesterday
I am doing research on google
for this ppt
PROFILING

Targeted advertising: advertisements become personalGoogle tracks what you search. Demographics, interests, gender, etc— you can look at any person
and think what to show them. Users express themselves in a public way.
Gmail; intercepts and reads your email. Google is even developing a search AI.
Its very close to how federal entities such as FBI or CIA track citizens, even though they use
tracking for other reasons.

“The world’s biggest public park and shopping mall is currently the internet. Banner ads are really
storefronts, so replacing them with a museum seemed like a good idea. I really wanted the project to
seem pervasive to echo the government’s watchful eye, and so I wanted my banners everywhere.
Retargeting is this technology that every ad platform has for delivering ads exclusively to people
who have already visited your website. It’s much cheaper to deliver ads this way so you can be
really aggressive about how often they appear. I built the concept of a personalized museum that
follows you, a utopic idea in some ways, but also intensely distopic.”
Jeremy Bailey: Museum of you (2015).

Jeremy Bailey: Museum of you (2015).

Any third party can obtain personal information via the blackmarket or in auctions - when a
company goes bankrupt they can sell these assets. Snowden: third party information is being used.
The internet now is full of ‘stalkers’, not a spies, but in fact companies that just stands right behind
you, collecting your information. They slow down your internet connection and your bandwidth.
Ad blockers are not perse anti-advertising: they are about privacy - its one way to reclaim the
power over what trackers know, how much they know and how they use and safe their information.
AdBlockers

Cambridge Analytica Ltd was a British political consulting firm which combined data mining, data
brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication during electoral processes in the USA.
Cambridge Analytica

Statlistics: sexual orientation,
Paramount lists: alcohol, sexual and gambling addictions and debt
Exact data: sexual transmittable disease, sex toys
You can even buy personalized profiles per disease
Data is more valuable than the service

Firefox Lightbeam
Who is connected to you : shows what third party sites that receive some kind of information on
you. A web of tracking emerges that is pretty spectacular.

In 2004, the U.S. Army made a colossal mistake. It introduced a new digital camouflage called the
Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), a single pattern designed to work across all environments. Only
a few months later, however, as the war in Iraq was intensifying by the day, every soldier on the
ground knew the truth: by trying to work in every situation, UCP worked in none of them. Why did
pixels do a better job that traditional blobs? Because pixels are better at mimicking fractal patterns—
which our eyes interpret as white noise. By looking less like figurative "nature," digital camo gives
our eyes nothing to fixate on. "You can't just throw paint on a wall and call it camouflage," he says.
"We're not necessarily trying to create randomness. We want the brain to interpret patterns as
part of the background.” All digital camo has two layers: a micropattern (the pixels) and a
macropattern (the shapes the pixels form). If the scale of the macro blobs is too small—as they are
with UCP—it triggers an optical phenomenon called "isoluminance," rendering the carefully-
constructed camo pattern into a light-colored mass. In other words, it makes it incredibly easy to
spot targets from a distance. That was one of the biggest problems with UCP, as you can see. In
2004, when the army introduced UCP, it revealed that there was no black in the entire pattern.
Black doesn't occur in nature, officials explained. But black and brown are essential to mimic
shadows. A pattern for the ‘Improvement Effort’ includes something called "boundary luminance," a
thin black line along the macro and micropatterns that tricks the eye into seeing 3D shapes.
Camouflage

CamouflageThe Dutch government "used a pretty spectacular method for hiding these locations, which does
everything but hide them, basically.” Henner, who lives in the UK, decided to turn this form of
censorship into art. His series of high-resolution Google Maps renderings is called "Dutch
Landscapes." Created in 2011, the series has been on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art
and elsewhere. Next month, he said, it will be on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Stef van Gaalen: The National Algorithm (2017)

From: Becoming Fog (Mushon Zer-Aviv, 2015)

since the early days of Usenet, misspellings have been used as a way to overcome censorship. By
ignoring the suggested corrections, the misspellings can be a gateway to an alternative world.
When doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Linda
Hilfling discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. By deliberately
spelling Tiananmen incorrectly, she was taken to web-pages where other people had misspelled
Tiananmen, and was thereby able to access pictures of demonstrations as well as the legendary
image of the student in front of the tank through the sources of incorrect spellings.
Misspelling as activism

An integral part of a search engine is the spelling control which suggests alternative words if it
suspects that you have misspelled your search terms, prompting “Did you mean:”.
Erik Borra: Misspelling generator (2007)

AdNauseamNot using the strategies of blocking (opting-out) or circumvention (by picking a fight). In
AdNauseam you do not disappear. You create an environment around yourself that makes you hard
to be recognised or track, just as the white cyclosa trash line spider. Reasons: to buy time, offer
plausible deniability, provide cover, elude surveillance, express protest, foil profiling and impair
databases.

Anna Russett: i bought the first 5 things
Facebook recommended me. (2017)This video by Russett shows the blurred line between advertising, tutorials and influencer/lifestyle
videos While targeted advertising becomes more and more advanced, products and services are
now matched with a very small group of people. Users are starting to trust computer suggestions.
In the future websites will contain embedded emotion sensing technologies.

Influencers:WHEN SAHARA LOTTI started her lash extensions company, Lashify, in 2017, she didn’t know what
she was getting herself into. It wasn’t making and selling fake lashes that stumped her—she was
more than prepared for that—but rather the bizarre and shadowy industry of influencers that
seemed to envelop her.
Influencer culture offers "real people living real lives": they offer an alternative for traditional
product placement. We need to want to understand if something is made for someone to buy
something: What is the difference between a tutorial an advertisement, or a tv show? Most of us
cannot see the different between add and “content", and this is problematic.

Constant Dullaart - The possibility of an Army
Do we wish to measure cultural value simply by those figures that a profit-maximizing company
collects and prepares?

As a social economic reset, and what social value their profiles represented before is lost. We live in
a representation of a world which we can influence in ways never imagined. Let’s do so per-
formatively. “How do we end the unbridled use of this false validation system in journalism? How can
we make clear that follower counts, views or likes are not and will never be a trustworthy measure
of social commitment as long as financial incentive is in place to manipulate these counts?”
Constant Dullaart - The possibility of an Army (2015)

A left-wing protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park, located in New
York City's Wall Street financial district, against economic inequality.
Occupy Wall Street

faceless anonymity: fictional acronyms, flee visibility Political refusal of visibility through tactics of
escape, disappearance, eligibility, opacity imperceptibly, invisibility and refusal of identification

Ghost Dance (1983) - Ken McMullen
Long before memory,
in a past without form,
they began to appear in the darkness of the night
and then as memory we began to screen them out.
They slipped into language
hiding between letters
and jumping out between words

I believe that modern developments in technologies and telecommunication are not diminishing the
realm of ghosts.
I believe that ghosts are part of the future
And that modern technologies such as cinematography and telecommunications enhance the power of
ghosts and their ability to haunt us: the ghosts are making a comeback.
Derrida On 'Ghostly Hauntings' ... And Kafka's 'Ghost'

Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)Whereas Futurism was about alienation, Romatiscism was about becoming.
It is an attitude in which artists formulated the transient, the change.
Friedrich adapted the generic conventions of landscape painting to the demands of creative self-
expression. The painting is painted vertically, putting an emphasis on the body in the middle. The
vanishing point is behind the man; you cannot see what the man is feeling.

Friedrich rarely painted daylight, or any form of light as it shines during a clear day - instead he
used the cover of night, sunset and sunrise or mist and fog to make light shine more
“mysteriously”. We can use this ‘fog’ or ‘mist’ allegory when trying to deconstruct the now
universal standards of Identification and locatability.
The more I am present, the more I am. If I wish to be less ‘me’, less targetable, I need to withdraw
from recognition, I need to learn to become opaque. In contemporary fog we can follow tactics like
erasing, deleting, disappearing. Fog is an instrumental apparatus - it offers varying degrees of
visibility, clarity and obscurity. Fog makes revolt possible.

Becoming Fog: Tactical Media, Spam and Obfuscation Seminar, Winter Semester KHK 2018/2019

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Becoming Fog: Tactical Media, Spam and Obfuscation Seminar, Winter Semester KHK 2018/2019