“Everybody Deserves Love, Even You was the subject line of an email. Its despondent tone addresses contemporary cultural vulnerabilities, sadness, yearnings and desperation upon which marketers prey.”
-Anastasia Hare and Lynne Heller
Using a projected animation, a disco ball, and a computerized voice, Lynne Heller reworks text from thousands of spam emails into an exploration of desire, vulnerability and contemporary culture. The Internet exists in a blurry sphere between private and public. Surfing from home on a personal computer, our paths, searches and tendencies are charted by marketing companies who all inevitably all agree that we want and need to be thinner, bigger, and more virile. Spam uses misspellings as a strategic disguise, resulting in wordings that are “often funny, always bizarre, and occasionally poetic.” (Hare 2011).
While spam emails are gathered in dusty and rarely opened junk mail folders, the language they speak in is universally recognizable. By reworking them with such a disarming and intriguing aesthetic imbued with humour, Heller begins a process of drawing attention to, and feeding back information upon itself.
