“Not My Will but Thine be Done”—P.T. Barnum’s gravestone inscription

Graham Parker’s Fair Use considers the reviled phenomenon of spam e-mails, as a symptom of globalisation and as part of a historical continuum of deceptions played out through the communications technologies of each age.

Taking the form of a heavily (and spuriously) footnoted account of key moments in communication history, Parker’s associative archive ranges from US computer landfill sites in Nigeria to server farms in Virginia; from maps of nineteenth-century railroads to websites charting the current spread of a rogue seaweed through ships’ ballast tanks; from fake timelines of the last 200 years drawn from spam source code, to accounts of the historical origin of archetypal confidence tricks; from screen-grabs of spectral banking websites to the physical ‘big stores’ of depression-era long con tricks, interspersed with images of Parker’s own artworks and fragments of his crowded mail inbox.

Offset in an edition of 1,000 copies, full colour, five booklets in a slip case. Designed by Stewart Cauley. 210 x 140 mm.