"Riffing on the idea of junk e-mail as a lowly commercial life form, Mr. Jarnow along with the other curators, Daniel Greenfeld and Mike Rosenthal, tried to depict how an archaeologist 450 million years in the future might present current culture, based only on relics of spam...

Light-up dioramas, for example, show pictures of the actual deposed African leaders who are frequently the purported authors of e-mail proposing deals that typically involve wire transfers of many thousands of dollars. 'It is not known whether or not their appeals were received by willing accomplices or not,' the exhibit commentary says. 'If they were, most likely, those who responded were simply drawn into the deep unrest from which the requests sprang.'"