Automatosis Spectacle

Andre Breton wasn't directly an artist, but instead occupied a position as the primary instigator of Surrealism, which he saw as the juxtaposition of "two distant realities" brought together to create a new, uncanny union.

Automatic writing was one way to access this condition. It basically consisted of stream of consciousness scribbling that supposedly revealed, in a torrent of words, the old fashioned Freudian psyche from which our demons (and angels) can sometimes emerge.

I bring this up because of SPAM. Yes, I am referring to the bulk email and junk marketing messages that clog up the Internet with offers of favorable mortgages or offshore brides. In recent years a cold war has erupted between email software vendors (aligned with ISPs) and the spammers. The first group tries to put in place filters, barriers, and protections - while the second group tries ever more elaborate schemes to get past the defenses.

The latest spamming tactic consists of sending - along with the marketing item - almost-random paragraphs full of words that sound very similar to written human correspondence. These text must be put together by increasingly smarter algorithms. A sample paragraph taken directly from a mortgage re-fi email:

Forms of speech are either
simple or composite. Examples of the weather,
as in any other means of excitement that presented itself too.
He would have conducted me
immediately into the presence of nose;
as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it,
and very that it felt quite strange at first;

Okay, okay. I added the line breaks at certain intervals - but only to make a point. These messages are becoming increasingly eerie, and much akin to automatic writing from cyberspace. I've started to browse my SPAM folder, in search of the perfect auto-surrealist couplet or cyberhaiku. There are millions of algorithms pounding away randomly at typewriters - when will we discover the next Hamlet?