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This video loop is part of a cluster of data-processing works by Coupons≠Coupons, including an essay by the same title (presented at the 2007 Electronic Poetry Festival in Paris) and the HTML-work A Bride in White Who Is Not a Virgin. The work developed through informal email exchanges, Coupons sending Coupons bits of media and modulating them back-and-forth in a spirit of play. The occasion to put together the video was celebratory: the Coupons≠Coupons blog was suddenly being featured at the top of Google's Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for queries like "alprazolam honduras rainbow." This unprecedented fame was a direct result of a powerful spam-data set posted to the blog, which Coupons had found secretly embedded in the HTML pages of the Situationist International text archive Bureau of Public Secrets. To explain the source of the video loop's central image-structure, it's important to know that Coupons used Sitemeter to study the surge in blog traffic resulting from the data set's visibility to Googlebot. Here is Sitemeter's animated logo:

Coupons made an HTML-transformation of the gif by enlarging its width to 300 pixels, then posted the transformation to the Coupons blog, convinced of its beauty:

In response, Coupons took close-up video of the gif transformation, producing the background for the video loop. In the early stages of the celebration, screenshots of the Google SERPs featuring Coupons≠Coupons had been posted to the blog, as well as the Cheers theme-song mp3 loop. These materials were combined with video of the Sitemeter gif.

On the first night of the post_moot festival in Oxford Ohio (April 2006), Coupons≠Coupons used What Spam Means to stage a performance under the staircase of cris cheek's basement. The video was projected through the steps onto the wall so that those wishing to be present had to walk down through the light to attend to the performance (the party was going on upstairs). Coupons≠Coupons sang along with the video for close to an hour, and at times the "spectators" would sing along with us. Jason Zeh filmed this performance. A cabaret version of the sing-a-long was given by Coupons≠Coupons & Josh Strauss at the Talking Head Club in Baltimore (July 2006), and the loop was screened at Western Virginia University (September 2006) for the conference BIOS: the poetics of life in digital media hosted by Sandy Baldwin.

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