"Spam is a controversial term, and it conveys a lot of negative
aspects. That is why I chose it."

Frederic Madre is one of those names one almost immediately associates
with trouble. Yet, like with most net.rebels, Madre is not half as
extreme as the discussions around his actions and words might suggest.
There is a rousing of public sentiment, a way of scaring people, by
opponents of Madre (and likeminded) in the battle for less interference
of moderators in mailinglists. This interview hopefully helps to keep
the discussion around how communities are shaped online, and how to work
with mailinglists in this area, visible. In this interview Frederic
Madre explains his history from being just another IT-drone with a punk
background to being a journalist and later an initiator of publications,
events and experiments, all in or around the net. He has a very clear
view of the connection between the willful structuring of social life
and political action in computer networks. In the interview we
concentrate on his most famous interventions yet: the spam engines on
the Pleine Peau site. We neither mention the mini conference on net art
Madre organised in 1999, nor do we talk about the Syndicate meeting he
organises together with Andreas Broeckman in Paris end of this year.

+ + +

Josephine Bosma: Tell me a little bit about your history. when did you
get onto the net? I know you from 7-11, were you active before?

Frederic Madre: I got on the net in 92 or 93, I had been on compuserve
for a few years already. I used a terminal emulator which ran at 300
bauds and which was all green on black with a text interface. Later on
I found an internet link for email, and I subscribed to an indie
american rock mailinglist. I remember the first time I posted to that
list. I reacted to a guy who wrote a long text in which he explained in
elaborate detail what he liked about a particular band. My answer only
said: yes, I agree. Immediately, rob vaughn, the admin sent me a
personal email: if you do this again you're off the list (we both laugh
out loud, JB). Several people approached me saying: (husky voice) you
don't do this! This is the internet. We should not waste bandwidth, so
stop immediately! Some of them were kind. I thought: this is so great!
There was no worldwideweb yet, which started of course in 1994. I began
to write about music, as I am a big music fan. I was a punk in '76 and
well, I have tons of records. Anyway, I wrote record reviews and stuff
like that, but after a while I got bored with this strict format. You
could not write about anything else but music and a certain kind of
music too or you would be thrown out of the list again. Several people
actually got kicked out, including some famous musicians who wanted to
talk about something else for a change. As I wanted to discuss movies or
contemporary artshows, whatever, I simply started to write some texts on
these topics and sent them to a few people. There were maybe 15 people I
sent stuff regularly to. One of them, Ian Christe, was a friend of a
friend at Wired magazine and a writer too. They got forwarded some text
I wrote about an artshow in Paris. They thought it was 'hysterical', I
remember the word. John Alderman asked me to write for (hot)Wired. So,
next thing you know, they send me to Berlin, where I covered the Christo
Reichstag wrapping for Hotwired. I got paid, they paid for the travel,
the hotel. There was a guy from federal express to pick up my photos at
my real workplace and ship them to california. They had lots of money at
the time. So, I kept writing for them although the news format was
getting to be a drag. Later on, they laid off people and the company was
sold. They had to find money, and it became more difficult to write
interesting things, so I stopped.

JB: How did you get into the net.art scene ?

FM: At the time I was writing those things I got frustrated because it
was all just 'news' for wired. I always had to find something 'new' that
would interest them. Back in 1994 I had started my own website,
initially my homepage of course, which evolved into a small magazine on
the web. I became influenced by a movement in the US that was pretty
big, called 'personal narrative', which I discovered by being on dozens
of mailing lists. There were lots of websites that were run by
individuals who were telling their life stories. Important examples of
those are 'the Fray' by Derek Powazek, 'Anthology' and 'after Dinner' by
Alexis Massie and another one called 'so anyway' by someone whose name I
keep forgetting. There were hundreds, all networked by interlinking.
Those people were designers mostly. Their sites were very beautiful,
just a few images and text, ultra simple html written with notepad. They
were just telling their stories, and they were quite frantic. Every day
they would change something on the site, and it was very exciting to go
there. Funny stories, often their daily problems. There were so many of
them that it was a movement. I wanted to do something like this, so I
did this with porculus, mirabelle and caroline sarrion. Net.art only
comes very late into my story, because when I first started Pleine-Peau
with my friends, we wanted to do some kind of political, free expression
magazine. David Hudson, of rewired.com turned me to other things. He
told me about this 7-11 mailinglist for net.art. I got on it and I
thought it was great. I did not know nettime at that time. Later I was
told nettime was a private list, and on the site was written you had to
ask someone to allow you on it. 7-11 was much more interesting. Nettime
was just those long texts, which was so boring after a while. I wondered
why all those people did not put their texts on the web and send the url
to the list… On 7-11 people were actually doing something creative
within the mail itself. So I started to get in the mood too. I did not
call it net.art or anything, all that ascii stuff. I wondered how they
did that, so I gave it a try. Now I know people used software, and I do
too, that changes pictures into ascii and tweaked it but at first I was
doing it by hand! Typing all the spaces, wondering how to do a curve in
ascii just by using my keyboard (laughs). I spent hours doing this! What
I liked was that there were those forms on Ljudmila or irational that
you could use to send mails to the list as if you were Keiko Suzuki. I
thought it was fantastic to have this machine to send mail to the list
where people did not really know where it was coming from. This was a
great idea which evolved into what I used for my mailinglist Palais
Tokyo, something I call spam art.

JB: Do you consider what you do now as net art then?

FM: No. In a way of course I do, but I do not want to be labelled as
such because it does not add anything to say so. There is no need to
call it art. I see it as a way of doing what I always do, which is
fiction. Fiction on the internet in all possible ways. I have simple
stories I put on the web. There are mailinglists where I tell stories,
plus I have the spam art machine. The latter are also a way of telling
fiction. They are machines which are interacting between the web and
mailing lists. You can submit words in special fields, you press a
button and out it goes, reformatted and the meaning is reformatted by it.

JB: Is it a concrete poetry machine?

FM: It could be called this. It is, but I do not like the word poetry.
It produces some of that stuff I loved on 7-11, but in an automated way.
I am influenced by all those movements that were trying to use the page
space as a tool and make the layout tell part of the story, which I also
wrote about for Vuk's solo ascii show. It is also automatic fiction
because you just feed it with words, and the machine constructs the
meaning. The words are messed in a different order than you put them in,
and it adds other words too. It is very strange to see how people use
them. Some use them to make beautiful things, and others use it to
overflow certain mailinglists. Some even use them to abuse individuals.
There was a big incident where somebody suddenly attacked the Syndicate
mailinglist with them, for some reason that had nothing to do with
Pleine-Peau or me. And of course there were problems with Nettime, but
that is usual. It's a limit tester… There are several ways in which
one can use them. I think they are nice and I might do more. In fact in
France there are now several people that have started to do these kind
of machines, after mine. All those machines were used in conjunction
with my mailinglist Palais Tokyo. We received sometimes hundreds of them
in one day. It became some kind of movement also, spam art, a french
movement let's say.

JB: You are of course aware that the word 'spam' itself is almost enough
to make a lot of people stagger on the net, especially hackers and old
time net purists. So your spam machine also has a few (net) political
implications. What do you think of those, how do you think you position
yourself towards those people?

FM: First I have to say that there is a big technological gap between
this first experience years ago when I got on the net and people wanted
to throw you off list if you sent mail bigger than 2k and now that I
produce so called spam on purpose. Nobody really cares anymore. Nobody
remembers 'netiquette' anymore, which I'm not saying is a good evolution
but it's a fact. I used to refer boring spammers to the original RFCs
(request for comments), which explain how to behave. Nowadays sometimes
I do not behave myself according to old school rules, I stopped doing
this… But this is a logical evolution now that the bandwidth is rather
open and access is easier and cheaper, it is not a technical problem
anymore. It became more important to freely send mail and express
yourself, and explain to people that they can use the net, rather than
let it stay something one has to be careful with and use with restraint.
In France for example there is one mailinglist where people are
subscribed, but when you send a mail, the list members get very upset.
They are subscribed, but do not really want to receive anything. Maybe
they like to go out and buy bread and tell their baker "I am on a
mailinglist!". Then they go home, find those mails and go: "O shit!". So
I did spam art also as a provocation towards those people. When I have
something to say on a list, I say it. When someone says something I like
I will however not say simply: I agree, but I will probably react to it
more elaborately. Spam is a controversial term, and it conveys a lot of
negative aspects. That is why I chose it. I am often very negative and
confrontational about things, I think that disorder raises
consciousness. There are lots of negative things that happen on the net,
like everywhere else, and people are too nice to each other often. They
are not agressive enough, I guess they are building their career. Using
the word spam art gave a bad reputation to something that was happening
before. I just coined the word spam art because it was fun, and it had
connotations that people do not like. Which was what I wanted: to
provoke. Now I have this reputation as a specialist of commercial spam,
but I don't know how to use spambots for instance.

JB: What do you think of the often rigid measures providers take against
spam? There are no official laws, there is no jurisdiction around spam,
there is only some vague old consensus. On the basis of this people are
being blocked from using their account.

FM: I think this is basically a fascist thing. The whole bussiness
around preventing spam is that people think they are -protecting- others
from something that they, of all people, judge is bad for others, but
protection is a right-wing value. Insecurity and fear are part of right
wing ideology. Protection from spam means that somebody somewhere is
dictating what is acceptable and what is not. Of course I get more and
more spam. Every day I get spam for porn sites, or how to get rich in
ten days… but I just delete it. What is the big problem about it? I
don't care, it is a ridiculous way of selling stuff and everybody knows
it is. Some people do business against spam, and they think they are
righteous. We do not need more police on the net, and we certainly do
not need pseudo-left police with so called good intentions.

JB: Does the problem not lie with what exactly the definition of spam
is? Your spam art or spam engines are not the same as those porn or big
money advertisements.

FM: What they have in common is that you did not ask for it to be sent
to you. But when you are on a list, you also get things you did not ask
for. You get input from people you would not get otherwise. A lot of
stuff you get on mailinglists is spam in the traditional definition. A
lot of it is announcements, adresses of websites. In what way is it
different from other advertisements? It is promotion for your stuff. The
only difference might be that it's on or off topic promotion… For
instance I was doing something similar on a french list: each time I was
sending small stories specifically written for email, but each time I
would include links to my site, woven inside the story. It was publicity
for my site but it was a story too, I think it's fair enough. People
should question their own use of mailinglists. When you write to a list,
you're supposed to 'contribute' to the damn 'community'. But if you add
a link to your site, then it can