Spamland, scripting video with spam

Spamland

Spamland is the series of movies produced by the The Brothers McLeod using as scripts ‘inauthentic text’ used in spam messages. Inauthentic text is a generated grammatically-correct nonsense that spammers use on top of their email to effectively trick spam filters. So abstracting a little bit, spam has mutated till digesting its own junk element to survive and escape the growing filter’s artificial intelligence. And this textual randomly generated content is then interpreted in its own involuntary surreal results. In Spamland videos spam text is materialized in one possible visual form. In fact its (il)logical sequence is finally translated into movie scripts and the McLeod’s skills are able to almost completely exploit text’s involuntary poetic form, producing elegant animations with an intrinsic derailed character. The narrative is indeed carefully reflecting this character and the ‘land of spam’ results then as an oneiric and ethically absurd environment. This happens because the generated text is not simply making sense but it’s also constructed to specifically trick spam filters, or to reverse engineering their checking rules. Finally the movies transmit a disturbing feeling, very typical of every amount of unsolicited information.