The Spam Oracle ...


passes for civilization in these parts. An agricultural society


it is also …

erecting a metal post of some kind. There is a elegantly dressed ancients awaited us. Led by the most ancient of them


and it would like to tell you that

Content biting hand that, feeds it cash.


Ask a question of The Spam Oracle, or tell it what’s on your mind. The Oracle responds with a random selection of text culled from the 291 spam emails delivered to one email account between 21 December 2006 and 20 January 2007. A Perl script accesses a directory of eight spam-filled text files, picks one file at random, and plucks its response from that file.


epochal_stream
chapel_maestro
chase_temporal
lace_metaphors
polecats_harem
palace_mothers
shoelace_tramp
talc_semaphore


The directory files themselves were created in the cut-up fashion popularized by Burroughs and Brion Gysin: All eight files were opened and tiled across the desktop, and the spam folder was manually scanned for interesting (and at least marginally coherent) words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. These were copied and pasted arbitrarily into one of the eight directory files. Additionally, each fragment was randomly interspliced with those previously added, rather than simply being appended to the end of the file.

These files will continue to grow and evolve over time; forward your interesting spam to the.spam.oracle@gmail.com if you'd like to add to the Oracle.











Many (many, many) thanks to the PerlMonks, particularly CountZero, for help turning a spaghetti of n00b code into the foundation for a working CGI script; to Dr. Andrew Young of the University of Salford School of Computing, Science and Engineering for help connecting the final dots; and to T for the inspiration.


When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time you find that some of the cut-ups and rearranged text seem to refer to future events.

I cut up an article written by John Paul Getty and got “It’s a bad thing to sue your own father”. This was a rearrangement and wasn’t in the original text. And a year later one of his sons did sue him.

Now this is purely extraneous information and meant nothing to me. I had nothing to gain on either side. We had no explanation for this at the time, suggesting perhaps that when you cut into the present, the future leaks out.


William Burroughs
Naropa Institute
1976



Is it me, or is spam just getting weirder and weirder and weirder?

I mean seriously ... wtf?

Teigan
Trysting Fields
October 2006



other online cut-up projects:

internet anagram server
the lazarus corporation
language is a virus
when you run out of words


other spam art projects:

spoetry
fresh spam
spam plants
the words of albert spamus