Mailia

Net.art project, 2006; Book, installation, 2019

A dozen years ago, I released Mailia, open-source software designed to be used to answer personal emails. The software, of course, was not meant to be perfect but rather provocative, and deep in my heart, I was expecting someone to notice it and to continue developing it. To my knowledge, it has not been developed further.

Artistic Concept

At present the rapidly expanding Semantic Web analyzes digital information in order to distinguish valuable content from digital trash. As well modern day search engines give more and more precise results of searched information yet how far will this artificial intelligence go? Will we eventually be able to leave it to machines to perform automated tasks such as creating images or writing texts?

For example digital information that is delivered via email increases daily if not hourly which in turn takes more and more time to answer and sort. The email answering machine provides a solution for this as it will write the answer emails using material available online.

Mailia analyzes emails coming to ones mailbox and simply replies to them. Forget automated standard ‘Out of Office’ replies, Mailia is as intelligent as software like Eliza and as flexible as open source products. The email answering machine works in the following way: it grabs an incoming message, analyzes it, sends requests to the Google search engine, then picks up given results, sorts them, and outputs the information into an email form which is sent back to the sender. If answers are publicly saved, search engines will index the answers again and utilize these as output for other similar replies. Ironic as this statement may seem – ‘Why not let the machines live their own lives’.

Mailia is free software released under the GNU General Public License.

Net.Art Project

Net.Art project has been operating and sending replies to the emails till 2007. The project has been archived at
http://triple-double-u.com/mailia-archive

Book

A book Mailia about a conversation between a human and a machine, and the power of hybrid poetry, enhanced by AI. Who the hell is better? A human, a machine? I believe that both contribute individually, and there is no longer any separation between a human and a machine. Welcome to the hybrid world!

This book includes Mailia software, which was released a dozen years ago, and along with it, the README file, including the concept of the project, the INSTALL instructions for installing the software on a personal server, and the GoogleSearch.wsdl file, an instruction file for the Google search engine. The book also includes part of the feedback-loop thread of emails from the Rhizome mailing list and the text about the Mailia project, written by me in 2016.

Colophon

Title: Mailia
Author: Mindaugas Gapševičius
Hardcover
Pages: 240
Copy Editor: Elizabeth McTernan
Print Run: 200
Designer: Brigita Kasperaitė
ISBN: 978-609-96084-1-9
© mi_ga, 2006
© Mindaugas Gapševičius, 2019
© Institutio Media, 2019
Printer: REPRO, Kaunas, Lithuania
Publisher: Institutio Media

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