Last Friday saw a great performance by Malte Steiner (Elektronengehirn) at the Open Ear event in Cardiff. Malte sent a very interesting proposal a few months ago and it was via this I discovered that some of his work focuses on the use of spam, the refuse of the internet, for generating content for art work.

First Person Spam (images above and concept video below) is an interactive installation which employs a 3D gaming environment where all the imagery is taken from image based spam emails. The 3D world is purpose built for this spam images, a world where advertisments pervade every part of the architecture:

As an undesired side-effect of the globalization and one of the few businessmodels which survived the dot.com hype, unwanted advertisement email services, known as spam, are an important factor of net traffic…First Person Spam is my second work about this aspect of modern communication and abuse of infrastructure. I started to collect the most interesting material which I received and construct in this installation a virtual architecture made of spam. This environment is a hell of billboards and reminds of the grassroots activities of anti advertisement agencies of the 60s.

In some respects similar to Jodi’s game art such as SOD, First Person Spam creates an immersive space where the space itself is art. Here however the space is not an abstraction of code instead it’s a reflection of the globalised, networked western economy.

More videos of the installation can be seen here. More work using spam by Malte Steiner includes Spam.