how spam mediates our world

in the early days of the internet, email spam was an eclectic yet pervasive part of the digital world. despite being a nuisance, its euntrepreneurial authenticity spoke to a web that was transparent, absurd and clear in intention. now, the world is steeped in the hypermediation of targetted advertisement, digital a/b testing and the commodification of social media. instead of the internet with traces of spam, we now consume spam with traces of the internet.

the three axioms of spam

  1. if you don't see spam around you, that means that everything around you is spam.
  2. if you don't let spam into your medium, your whole medium will turn into spam.
  3. the proliferation of spam is ubiquitous and sharply increasing.

spam church is an antidote for the modern soul, providing digital interaction that subverts the spamminess we have all come to consume without really knowing it. it is both an art collective and an aggregator of content from artists across the cyberverse that try to take back the internet from its colonizers and corporate overlords.

some antidotes we endorse

deep angel

artificial intelligence generating a storm of omission

spam alter

a physical alter to the spam church that resides in the Walter Benjamin Museum of Spam Art in Madrid, Spain

Aesthetics of Absence

making salient the things that are disappearing from around us

Nostalgia Box

spirituality and technology

learning about infrastructures for worship



spam is machine learning

the first mass-scale, consumer-centered global deployment of corporate machine learning was spam filtering. these corporations' algorithms cut their teeth their filtering trillions of grandma's birthday e-cards and business offerings of nigerian princes. ai was celebrated as a tool for removing the spamminess of the world ala Bayesian Filtering.

Today, the story is the opposite: these filtering algorithms are now the central producers of spam, Throughout its fit with spam, ai has learned over what grabs our attention and what doesn't. As a result, AI today overwhelmingly creates digital experiences that are carefully optimized for Impressions, Reach, Engagement Rate, CPM, Click Through Rate and Page Views. What's missing is the surprise and novelty that can only come from self-discovery


spam is for everyone

we are not on social media. you cannot or spam church. there are, however, two ways to get involved:

  • make things with the above vision in mind. if you do, tell us about it and we will post it here for all to use.
  • take agency in your consumption of digital media: challenge the techegemony by reappropirating the internet towards the embetterment of human interaction.







...and tastes of silicon