My friend Graham Parker and I have been in an on-going conversation about spam, filtering and such like, mainly in relation to his art practice that's often drawn on these things, and based on our mutual fascination with the poetical qualities of all the dadaist filter-busting stuff that te guys selling Vigara like to put at the bottom of their emails. A while back, in New York, we got to talking about the Storm botnet, and later Graham wrote with the fruits of some further digging:

"I thought you might like the following - a list of subject headers for the storm worm e-mails. It reads like a double concept album about War and Love:

230 dead as storm batters Europe.
A killer at 11, he's free at 21 and...
British Muslims Genocide
Naked teens attack home director.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Russian missle shot down Chinese satellite
Russian missle shot down USA aircraft
Russian missle shot down USA satellite
Chinese missile shot down USA aircraft
Chinese missile shot down USA satellite
Sadam Hussein alive!
Sadam Hussein safe and sound!
Radical Muslim drinking enemies' blood.
U.S. Southwest braces for another winter blast. More then 1000 people are dead.
Venezuelan leader: "Let's the War beginning".
Hugo Chavez dead.
President of Russia Putin dead.
Third World War just have started!.
The Supreme Court has been attacked by terrorists. Sen. Mark Dayton dead!.
The commander of a U.S. nuclear submarine lunch the rocket by mistake..
First Nuclear Act of Terrorism!.
So in Love
Happy World Religion Day!
Most Beautiful Girl
Someone at Last
I Believe
The Dance of Love
The Miracle of Love
All For You
Vacation Love
I am Complete
Wrapped Up
Moonlit Waterfall
A Little (sex) Card
A Special Kiss
Hugging My Pillow
Safe and Sound
You're Soo kissable
A Romantic Place
Breakfast in Bed Coupon
For You
I Love You So
Want to Meet?
We Are Different
We Have Walked
You Asked Me Why"
 

I went down the stairs and out the front door. Susan and Ellen were in the office talking. I didn't say anything to them. I walked out the door and turned right.

What did you do then?

I walked to the corner. I thought about going straight down as usual, but instead crossed the street. I began walking up a slight hill to the Brown Quadrangle. I passed two people as I turned into the Quadrangle. I took a diagonal left, which would leave me out between two libraries.

Wait, I remember crossing the first intersection. I think there was little or no traffic.

After writing my slightly hysterical airport/journey post the other day I checked mail and came across this piece by Alan Sondheim titled Memory of a Walk, quoted above. I don't know Alan's work that well, largely from his postings on Nettime some of which have been amazing. I really loved the blankness and calm of this recent piece -  mundane and enigmatic at the same time.

*

Had mail from Neil Bennun following brief previous entries here on Fénéon, the three line novel and newspaper sign-boards. Neil sent a bunch of images from his collection of newspaper sign-board pictures, including the one above. Writing to him reminded me of the book Suitcase Body Is Missing Woman by Eva Weinmayr (Bookworks, 2005) which presents a fantastic archive of Evening Standard newsstand posters arranged in alphabetical sequence. 

About to enter 10 hours of questions and answers about art in The Frequently Asked. Thinking of this Henri Bergson quote from the performance/lecture by Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish last night

"Chaos is just the structure you weren't expecting to see."

And of this exchange I heard the other morning, two friends discussing a potential colleague:

Y: Is she disorganised?

X: Let's just put it this way; she is not in full control of the detail.

Y: [sceptically] What else is there?

*

Vlatka has a great story here at 1001 Nights Cast, the first time she has written for the project.

This, about Peter Higgs and hopes that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will finally find the Higgs particle and with it help figure out the origins of mass, when it starts to smash protons into each other next year. There's something fascinating to me about the view from now back onto 1960's science (be it computing, genetics or quantum) - the myth-making attention on the characters, their relations/rivalries/or lack thereof, the framework myth of science as a 'gentleman's game', the universities and research almost-before corporations, the present view on almost-amateurism and 'early days' in those fields that now seem long-established, institutionalised, utterly central. Also, I love those narratives, like this one - about a thing 'proved' first as pure theory but which then waits decades in hope that instruments or experiments will back it up as observed reality. Of his long wait for a confirmation of his theory Higgs, now 78 said "I have to ask my GP to keep me alive". I'm trying to figure out the possible relationships between that methodology (a theory waiting for proof) and art practice which so often (for me at least) starts by doing - action (words on paper or on screen, fooling around in the studio, arsing about with the video camera) first, and which then has to wait for a theory.

Also this (via my friend the artist Graham Parker) from earlier in the year, about Microsoft Research teaming up with biomedical researchers in Seattle, Boston and Perth, Australia, to see if anti-spam computer techniques can also be used to help design an AIDS vaccine. Something gripping about this idea too, not least because of the material/linguistic aspect - research founded on a pervasive (but-in-the-end-arbitrary) instance of metaphor.

Finally this - more mythological territory in science - about reconstruction of the Collosus code-breaking computers at Bletchley Park.