In SPAM2GAN_Scrolls (2021), Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde transforms one of the most persistent forms of digital detritus — the spam email — into a generative artistic medium.

Drawing from his personal archive of unsolicited messages, De Wilde employs Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to render fragments of text as uncanny images that hover between legibility and abstraction. These visual artifacts both disclose and estrange the underlying structures of spam, offering a new lens on language that is usually discarded. Rather than treating spam as an irritant to be deleted, De Wilde reframes it as a cultural archive and mirror of networked society.

Spam traces the shifting contours of digital modernity: its viral circulation anticipates the logics of social media, while its shifting content indexes anxieties, desires, and persuasion strategies embedded in online economies.

The SPAM2GAN_Scrolls thus reveal a shadow history of digital culture, one typically filtered out and forgotten. The project also stages a broader inquiry into the ontology of data. Is data a raw material to be mined and commodified, or a byproduct of everyday communication that silently accumulates and reshapes our environment? SPAM2GAN_Scrolls foregrounds this paradox, showing data as at once nuisance and necessity, waste and value.

Extending into real-time audiovisual performance, De Wilde integrates the GAN images with their source texts in TouchDesigner, layering synthetic voices that animate these fragments. The result is a hybrid archive — simultaneously forensic and aesthetic — that recasts spam as a generative record of digital life.