All Your Private Information
All Your Private Information
One day last Fall, my email spam filter failed, and I began to receive a next-generation, Nigerian-prince-phishing scam transmission, over and over. Popularly referred to as “sextortion,” essentially, the sender(s) claim they have inserted secret pixels into their pornography web site(s), and have overtaken the recipient’s computer, both stealing all of their contacts’ information, then turning on the web camera to document the recipient masturbating. Should one not feel compelled to deliver to them bitcoin ransoms via the dark web in amounts ranging from $377 to $688, this video footage would be delivered to everyone they’ve ever met.
Each email I received was slightly different linguistically. Because these are generated from somewhere deep in the former Soviet block, and the perpetrators are using translation software to generate these transmissions, this makes for often creative and poetic uses of the English lexicon.
All Your Private Information is a limited-edition portfolio of photograms of embroideries of segments of the language of sextortion. Out of their initial, ill-intentioned source material, the words sing like the cut-out magazine letters, forming a strange ransom note. Beautifully rendered in silver, they coo, “good day, my prey” and “think about the shame.” Each print is enclosed in a printed Asuka folder with a sextortion email printed on the front.
Each set of five photographic prints is contained in a handmade clamshell box with the title hand-embroidered on the front.
Edition: 5 variants + 1 A/P
Photography by Cami Leisk