Publications
1. Brucker-Cohen, Jonah,“Human Error: Projects That Emphasize “Misuses”
of Technology” Artist Talk”, International Symposium on Electronic Art, (ISEA 2022) , June 2022, Barcelona, Spain.
2. Brucker-Cohen, Jonah,”Human Error, A Collection of Work that Highlights Our
Misuse of Technology and the Internet”, EVA London 2022 ,
London, United Kingdom.
3. Brucker-Cohen, Jonah,”Human Error How Integrating Common Errors Into User Interfaces Can Challenge Our Perceptions and Change Design Thinking”, chapter in Green Revisited. Encountering Emerging Naturecultures in Art and Research Paperback, RIXC, Riga, Latvia, 2022.
Description
With the advancement of email beyond plain text into stylized and html designed emails in the form of newsletters, promos, surveys, links, and more, we are getting more email that fits the criteria for “spam” that is not meant to be spam. How often do you receive a message from someone or a company that asks you to “check your spam mailbox” to see if their message ended up there? Despite the fact that we know what constitutes spam emails and often try to avoid composing them by omitting embedded links or stylized HTML messages, our emails often end up there without our knowledge leaving us wondering if the recipients have received them or not. This form of “human error” is constant in our daily use of email and as emails gain the ability for richer content daily, without some kind of systematic change to what constitutes spam online, this problem will persist.
Example of “spam” email
Background
According to Statista, “between October 2020 and September 2021, global daily spam volume reached its highest point with almost 283 billion spam emails from a total of 336.41 billion sent emails”. “Human Error – Spam Mailer” is a software artwork that will automatically turn any typed email into one that will end up in the spam folder of the recipient. The software finds the most egregious spam words and automatically attaches and inserts them along with extra images, links, and embedded code into the message in order to weigh it down with problematic contents that spam filters will process. Some of these spam related keywords include“100% More”, “Extra Cash”, “Earn Money”, “Free Trial”, “Save big Money”, “Once in a Lifetime”, “Miracle”, Incredible deal”, and more.
