After some back and forth with my thesis committee chair, 30 minutes worth of “art consulting” with Moto, over an hour of lengthy discussion with Brian, I have finally settled with my thesis topic: World, meet “Spam.Art” (reads: spam dot art… not finalized).
About four or five years ago, I introduced a revolutionary idea (at the time anyway) to make art works open source and even published a paper with Miho for ISEA 2002 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Nagoya, Japan. The paper envisioned the eventual evolution of eletronic art to parallel the open source movement in the software industry. It also described an “evolutionary” element to the project being that only the fittest electronic art will survive the scrutiny of the fast paced electronics world.
Unfortunately, I never really got around to develop the thesis into anything tangible. Little did I know, Creative Commons was also working on something similar that same year and introduced a website that dedicated creating a ” creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works — whether owned or in the public domain — by empowering authors and audiences.” And then this year, I found a genetic art project that pretty much took care of the Darwinistic aspect of my previous thesis topic.
It was time to move on. And I am glad I did.
The “Spam.Art” project is intended to give email spams a different twist in how spams in general are perceived. It’s a software program that creates abstract visual art based on the spam it receives. I won’t discuss the details just yet. But I think the project is going to be a lot of fun to create and promote.
My runner-up project was “Sponsored by Brand X”, a corporate responsibility bashing type of ad campaign targeted at corporate entities that were involved in war crimes. But this idea was doomed to fail because there’s simply too many of this type of art projects going on. I won’t be making any more impact than the existing projects. Besides, Prof. Alan Schechner was already a step ahead of me on his “Holocaust Art”. Mine would have been similar idea but more of a “Rape of Nanking Art”… Not exactly a break through for a thesis. But I think I will march forward with the concept at another time given the magnitude of the holocaust in Nanking, and how Japan still officially denies it ever happened.