Inhaltliche Beschreibung
First Person Spam (fps) interactive installation by Malte Steiner
As an undesired sideeffect of the globalisation and one of the few businessmodels which survived the dot.com hype, unwanted advertisement email services, known as spam, are an important factor of net traffic. More then 60% of the emailflow are spam and although the response rate is in the promille range, it generates enough revenue that even big companys despite of the semi legality use the services of massmailers.
To create and send out millions of electronic letters, massmailercompanys use often hijacked computers, where trojans or worms do the dirty work.
First Person Spam is Malte Steiners second work about this aspect of modern communication and abuse of infrastructure. First he started to collect the most interesting material which pollutes his mailbox and construct in this installation a virtual architecture made of spam. This environment is a hell of billboards and reminds of the grassroots activities of anti advertisement agencys of the 60s.
The visual output is projected in the exhibition room and the audience can navigate through this virtual hell with step switches on the floor, connected to the computer running the software. Spam is also chasing the player and can be defeated. The technique and the inherent aesthetics are taken from the contemporary videogame industry, where still 3D engines and first person shooter games are considered to be state of the art (i.e. Doom3). Its implemented with the free open source software Blender (http://www.blender.org) which includes a realtime 3D engine besides a professional 3d modeling and animation package.