Graham Parker's FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM
Book Works presents a book in five short volumes, inspired by spam e-mails and historical con tricks
03.17.2009 – PUBLICATION DATE: JUNE 2009
Copies Available for Review
FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM
Book Works is pleased to announce the publication of FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM, by the award-winning artist and writer Graham Parker-a five part collection inspired by spam e-mails and their place in a longer lineage of con tricks and exploitations of human communication networks.
For much of the last decade, Graham Parker has been making artworks with and about spam - the despised white noise haunting the information age. In FAIR USE, his first book, Parker offers us a selection of his "notes from spam"-essays, projects and fragments from his growing archive of research and writings on this most contemporary phenomenon and its historical analogues.
The five sections of FAIR USE each start from a different site and time on earth, presented in separate, non-linear accounts that leap centuries and continents to invite the reader to discover and filter unexpected connections and continuity (in between trips to their own inbox...).
Illustrated with Graham Parker's artworks, as well as maps, photos and 'found' e-mails, the fragmented structure of FAIR USE offers no reliable starting point for the reader, but, in the spirit of its subject, repeatedly "resets" them to experience another claim, from another space and time, with the abundant footnotes sometimes deliberately serving as much to disorientate as inform. Neither wholly artist's monologue or critical commentary, FAIR USE is happy to pass as either from moment to moment, changing modes as elusively as its protagonists, yet speaking in a single, playful voice through each incarnation. The result is a dizzying and complex tracing of a delinquent urge through several paradigms of human communication -a poetic and humorous reading of the con and the global trash and vanities it travels through.
FAIR USE is comprised of the following five parts:
- Petrol Liar describes an encounter with a con artist on a street corner in a turn of the century Manchester whose industrial past is being reshaped for the claims of a digital moment
- Narrow Gauge links the 1941 death of Walter Benjamin in Portbou, Catalonia, with the contemporary fate of that border railway town in a Europe of evolving borders and networks
- 419 (occasional 420) treats spam as the lowest common denominator traffic of globalization - describing the inequities of consumption and access that link Nigerian '419' spam with technology landfills outside Lagos and server farms in Virginia.
- The Wire places the author in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, filtering spam-attempting to describe the process amidst a 'Lucky's monologue' of spam texts designed to get past the filters of both software and human credulity. Texts speaking in tongues from a culture much like our own - where the names Fallujah, Viagra and Nigeria can flow past undifferentiated in the daily clamor.
- Spectres of Marks takes the innovation of a small-time con artist in Cheyenne in 1867 and teases out a story that takes in medieval beggar gangs, Martin Luther, L.Frank Baum, Edgar Allan Poe and W.S.Gilbert-and ultimately the first spam e-mail from 1978.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham Parker was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1970. He studied at Manchester University and is also an alum of both the studio and the architecture and urbanism programs of the Whitney Museum ISP. He is director of floating ip (formerly a project space in Manchester, UK and latterly an occasional imprint operating from New York). He has written for Art Monthly, Time Out New York, Contemporary, Art Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Circa, Springerin. Parker has contributed numerous monograph essays and commentaries for other artists and for institutions ranging from PS1 to the Tate Gallery group. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
The remarkable design for FAIR USE was created by Stewart Cauley/Pollen, New York.
FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM
A book in 5 parts with slipcase; 160 pages
Publication date: June 2009
Book Works, London
ISBN 978-1-906012-04-5 90000
$32.00 / £13.00
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- FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM is five short volumes in a slipcase
- Part artist's monograph, part critical commentary
- History of spam, slang, and con tricks
- Based on artist's ongoing work with spam as 'material'
- Launching New York and London, June 2009.
- Resource Links
- Download Full Text PDF of FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM (contact publicity team for password)
- Graham Parker
- Publisher's Site
- Tags
- fair use, notes from spam, book, art, spam, con, confidence, grifter, sting, 419, Lagos, Nigeria, Virginia, New York, Brooklyn, Manchester, Engels, Benjamin, filters, snake oil, Marks, Marx, Spectres of Marx, Specters of Marx, Cheyenne, Council Bluffs, electronic arts, artist, Graham Parker, Petrol liar, The Wire, occasional 420, Narrow Gauge, Portbou, Catalonia, railroad, railway, Engels, Chtcheglov, Hacienda, Maurer, Melville, Poe, Stephenson, Turing, Schivelbusch, Derrida, Kracauer, spambot, bot, storm, Brooklyn, New York,
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- Captions:
- 1) Cover image, FAIR USE: NOTES FROM SPAM, by Graham Parker, 2009
2) Legal Action, Chris Consani
3) Unnamed spam gang, Lagos, Nigeria c. 2005
4) Benjamin/Bombers, C-Type Print, Graham Parker, 2007
5) Graham Parker, author
6) The Stokc to Watch, neon sign, Graham Parker, 2006
Open Book TV: Graham Parker at Brooklyn Navy Yard from Graham Parker on Vim wmode="transparent"eo.
TV Interview with Ina Howard for Open Book
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