Jill Magid – “Evidence Locker” http://www.
The artist asks you to sign up to receive emails that relate a story about her run-in with the police.
Rob Bevan and Tim Wright – “Online Caroline” (2000-2001)
Caroline isn’t actually real. She’s the fictional protagonist in a 24 part online drama calledOnline Caroline. The web site and emails are written and designed by Rob Bevan and Tim Wright, and Mira Dovreni acts Caroline’s part in the pre-recorded webcam sequences. You can be Caroline’s friend too if you go to her web site: <http://www.onlinecaroline.com>. [read essay on this project]
Miranda July – “We Think Alone” http://wethinkalone.
WE THINK ALONE was comissioned by Magasin 3 for a show called On The Tip of My Tongue. A themed compendium of ten emails would arrive every Monday, between July 1 and November 11, 2013, to the inboxes of those who had signed up to receive it. When the final email went out on November 11, 2013, WE THINK ALONE had 104,897 readers from 170 countries. There is no official archive of the emails, other than the collections saved by the subscribers.
“I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people — to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent — the more mundane the better. How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view. WE THINK ALONE has given me the excuse to read my friends’ emails and the emails of some people I wish I was friends with and for better or worse it’s changed the way I see all of them. I think I really know them now. But our inner life is not actually the same thing as our life on the computer — a quiet person might !!!! a lot. A person with a busy mind might write almost nothing. And of course while none of these emails were originally intended to be read by me (much less you*) they were all carefully selected by their authors in response to my list of email genres — so self-portraiture is quietly at work here. Privacy, the art of it, is evolving. Radical self-exposure and classically manicured discretion can both be powerful, both be elegant. And email itself is changing, none of us use it exactly the same way we did ten years ago; in another ten years we might not use it at all. Thank you to Kareem, Kirsten, Sheila, Danh, Lee, Etgar, Kate, Laura, Lena and Catherine for their daring and diligence.” – Miranda July
Ben Grosser – “Scare Mail” https://bengrosser.com/
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense. Each email’s story is unique in an attempt to avoid automated filtering by NSA search systems.
One of the strategies used by the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) email surveillance programs is the detection of predetermined keywords. These “selectors,” as they refer to them internally, are used to identify communications by presumed terrorists. Large collections of words have thus become codified as something to fear, as an indicator of intent. The result is a governmental surveillance machine run amok, algorithmically collecting and searching our digital communications in a futile effort to predict behaviors based on words in emails.
ScareMail proposes to disrupt the NSA’s surveillance efforts by making NSA search results useless. Searching is about finding the needles in haystacks. By filling all email with “scary” words, ScareMail thwarts NSA search algorithms by overwhelming them with too many results. If every email contains the word “plot,” or “facility,” for example, then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use.
The ability to use whatever words we want is one of our most basic freedoms, yet the NSA’s growing surveillance of electronic speech threatens our first amendment rights. All ScareMail does is add words from the English language to emails written by users of the software. By doing so, ScareMail reveals one of the primary flaws of the NSA’s surveillance efforts: words do not equal intent.
Xtine Burrough – “Mail A Virus” (2005) view archived artwork
On May 19th Mail A Virus was launched as part of Eyebeam’s arts and media Internet showdown, “Contagious Media” (May 19th – June 9th, 2005). Created out of nostalgia for computer viruses now considered “retro” and incorporating email as the apt transmitter, Mail A Virus allows viewers to browse postcards which depict now dated viral memorabilia, like the pervasive I Love You and Melissa email viruses. Although the Mail A Virus site itself is benign, it does test the level of technological hypochondria in a computer-age society. To the surprise of Eyebeam, artist xtine and collaborating programmer Vasna Sdoeung, the project was shut down by ISP Datagram within 72 hours of the project’s broadcast due to a “violation” of the terms of service.