‘Attention Seekers’ is a contemporary installation art piece reincarnating email spam – one of modern life’s annoyances – into something more calming and peaceful.
Around 45% of all email messages sent are unsolicited spam. With around 375 billion emails sent every day, that equates to 62 trillion (that’s 62,000,000,000,000) spam messages per year — all sent with the express intention to try and part the recipient with their money, through the sale of a product, service or subscription, or a scam of some kind.
Here are 40 such messages, vying for your attention in a different way.
The pattern on each cylinder of the mobile comes from emails found in my spam folder. For each element I have translated the text of the email into coloured blocks, one block is formed for every three letters. The bands of colour indicate the category of spam; from commercial, financial or pharmaceutical through to phishing, scams and fraud. This is determined by searching for specific keywords for each category within the email. Finally, I’ve printed a chopped up version of the subject line on top.
Exhibited as part of the ‘Evolve’ exhibition in The White Room, Worcester Arts Collective, September 2026.
Paper, wire and cotton thread, overall size 530x780mm.
