Spam, Porn and Bodily Computation

With the development of spam messages, porn became part of the constant flow of everyday digital culture and a massive presence in our mailboxes. The prevalence of Viagra at the end of the 1990s, after its approval as the first oral treatment for erectile dysfunction, added to the growth of spam practices, contributing to an altered “sexscape” and causing progressive hypersexualization of popular culture.

Spam is used by commercial porn websites to increase visitor traffic and search-engine visibility, often making use of automated spambots. But what is the relationship between spam and porn, besides the pervasive presence of pornographic content in spam messages? Adapting a Neoist slogan in 2005, Stewart Home and Florian Cramer claimed: “Program code is like pornography. It has linear logic, but no meaning. There is an accumulation of things already known. The focus is always on the same explicit facts. Repetition and boredom rule.” Is pornography becoming the banal copulation of zeroes and ones, and is this process made more pervasive through spam techniques? This panel analyzes misuse and abuse of online communication, sexual computational practices and porn fiction as code narrative, by focusing on a spectrum reaching from the history of spam practices to the potential of pornography as fictional computing. Furthermore, panel members will discuss the creative use of spam to challenge sexuality and desire, where sexual computation becomes artistic practice.