I don’t know what it is that fascinates me so much about shredding devices lately; maybe it’s just my latent destructive tendencies. That said, this art installation by artist Bill Shackelford just seemed too good to not mention.
Shackelford’s Spamtrap is a computer-driven sculpture that receives spam e-mails, prints them out, then immediately shreds and discards them.
The sculpture isn’t only generating a mountain of paper. It’s actually helping to build better anti-spam blacklists by submitting all messages it shreds to SpamCop. For those concerned about the (lack of) environmental correctness of the whole concept – not to worry – all of the paper Spamtrap shreds is being recycled after the fact.