11 Aug 2009, Posted by heingart in Art, Wired, 0 Comments

Tinkebell’s revenge

If you make a handbag out of your dead cat, you’re not going to make a lot of friends, even if you’re trying to raise awareness about the hypocritical way we treat animals. The Dutch artist Tinkebell (a.k.a. Katinka Simonse) found this out first-hand in 2004, when newspaper articles about her cat-bag (‘Pinkeltje’) led to at least a hundred thousand nasty e-mails in her inbox, many of which called for her scalp in no uncertain language.

So now Tinkebell has turned the tables on the hate-mailers. By using some clever Internet sleuthing, Simonse and her artist colleague Coralie Vogelaar uncovered the identities behind about a thousand of those e-mails, and have compiled them in a book called ‘Dearest Tinkebell’. It juxtaposes the original messages with all the personal data they could dig up on the angry mailers: their names, addresses, (naked) photographs, LinkedIn accounts, phone numbers, Facebook pages, etc.

The duo made ample use of an API from RapLeaf that lets you see the social-networking profiles that were created using a given e-mail address. And what they found was a surprise: most of the mailers were young girls, even the ones behind some of the most graphic threats.

But Tinkebell shrugs off any potential danger. “The messages don’t have any effect on me at all,” she said. “Once you’ve read ten of them, you’ve read them all. I’m not interested in these people.” Which explains why none of the portrayed were contacted about being included in the book, even the woman who appears on the cover.

This also opens a legal can of worms: are you allowed to just publish someone’s private details just because they threaten you? In Holland, as Tinkebell acknowledges, you can’t; she and Vogelaar wound up printing the book themselves after their publisher chickened out.

Precedent-wise, there’s the well-publicized 2006 case of Jason Fortuny, who posted graphic photos of unwitting Craigslist users who’d thought they were responding to a woman’s personal ad; in April an Illinois court ordered Fortuny to pay almost $75k in damages to one of the Craigslisters he’d exposed. But in Tinkebell’s case, no lawsuits have materialized so far. And if they do, “I’ll sue them back for sending me death threats.”

The 1000-copy run of ‘Dearest Tinkebell’ sold out within a few days of its release in May, but a special boxed version is still available, replete with original tufts of Pinkeltje’s fur.

(Originally published in Wired UK in August 2009)