Two projects by Bill Shackelford which employ the internet to affect events / things in ‘real’ space. These works highlight unseen cause (online / networked / virtual) and remind us of its very ‘real’ effects by demonstration through simple yet very physical (Cartesian space / ‘real’ world) and what could be considered violent ways.

Blogged (image above) is an networked interactive art installation and one day net event dealing with the concept of being ‘blogged’. Its purpose is to attempt to burst a red balloon 6 feet in diameter by using traffic from blogs linking to the art works webpage.

It first ran on Thursday May 31, 2007 live from The Ohio State University Art and Technology show “Digescape”. During this one day event I suggested a link for consideration to this installation to a number of blogs in hopes that they would blog it on their sites and include a link back to this page (http://billshackelford.com/home/portfolio_blogged). My website then monitored the traffic coming from these blogs and ran an air compressor for 1 second for each visit, filling up and then popping the 6 feet in diameter red balloon live on the web. Visitors were be able to monitor the installation with a live video feed where they could watch the air compressor fill up the balloon and then pop. I turned everything on at 12:30 pm and notified several blogs of the installation shortly after. The balloon popped around 5:30 pm the same day.

The idea came from a previous experience when my artwork was fortunate to be blogged by several blogs. I found it interesting to see how quickly artwork spread from blog to blog. It was also interesting to see as time passed and the posts about my artwork would fade into the blog archives, that the traffic to my site dried up almost as fast as it arrived.

Spamtrap (image above, video below) is an interactive installation:

that prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses I created specifically to lure in spam and an old unused personal email address I use to lure in spam. I do not use these email addresses for any other communication. I post these individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.

Because I know that all email sent to these email addresses are spam, I have set the installation to print and then shred each email as it arrives. Simultaneously the installation is feeding spam blacklists on the web with information gathered from all the received spam (a newly added feature). This in turn helps to feed spam filtering systems across the web that are working to reduce the amount of spam we all receive. Click here for more information about Spamtraps.

The installation uses a Pentium II computer connected to a wireless network, personal printer, personal shredder, aluminum rails, Spamtrap email addresses, automatic printing software, email client software, antivirus software, and a SpamCop user account. The paper is recycled after the spam email has been shredded.

Originally seen on Bitbabble here and here.