Crackling Spam: A Critique of Digital Noise

An old telephone rests in a neglected corner, its handset is veiled in a thick layer of dust.
Once reconnected to the infrastructures of the present day, the tranquillity is abruptly disrupted. The telephone begins to ring—relentlessly. Yet the incoming voices are neither familiar nor friendly; they offer unsolicited products and services, the very embodiment of spam. In the logic of the neoliberal machine, as articulated by philosopher Byung-Chul Han, such intrusions exemplify an economy in which human attention has become a highly prized commodity.

Through Crackling Spam gradually, the crackle grows more insistent. The telephone transforms into an emblem of digital encroachment—of eroded privacy, pervasive unease, and the condition that Han describes as techno-anxiety. It reflects a paradoxical state of being: perpetually connected yet seldom present. The fear of missing out, coupled with the anxiety provoked by disconnection, keeps us suspended in a continuous state of alertness. Each call functions as a jolt, a reminder of our entanglement within the “burnout society”, where fatigue has become habitual and the crackling noise swells into an overwhelming presence.

Amid this accumulation of crackle and spam, however, a space for reflection emerges.
Crackling Spam invites us to consider: What is it that we seek to communicate? What, truly, do we wish to hear? How might we reclaim our powers of attention and restore a sense of intimacy in a world saturated by digital intrusions and dominated by techno-anxiety?

The work, Crackling Spam, traces the evolution of noise by situating a 1950s telephone alongside its technological descendants, culminating in the contemporary smartphone. This progression charts a trajectory from communicative clarity to digital pollution—from dialogue in its essential form to a cacophony of noise. It interrogates the degradation of public discourse, the erosion of communicative trust, the institutionalisation of disinformation, and the rise of intrusive marketing and unsolicited spam. These forces produce distraction, stress, and cognitive fragmentation, leaving us destabilised, bereft of time, and displaced from our own objectives—conditions symptomatic of life under capitalist subjugation.

The installation, Crackling Spam, centres on a telephone whose number has been deliberately released onto the internet for automated bots to harvest and incorporate into their databases. As a result, the piece becomes an interactive system in which visitors engage directly with the work by conversing with the spam callers. A functioning telephone line enables this encounter, positioning the visitor at the intersection of artwork and digital exploitation. For this purpose, a telephone line has been connected and a fictitious identity created, which is the one the spammers believe they are contacting to.

The term “crackle” originally referred to the characteristic noise of early telephone lines, a sonic artefact here reinterpreted as an evolutionary precursor to contemporary spam: unwanted calls, unethical and intrusive marketing, and fraudulent schemes.