Real Snail Mail is a webmail service created by artists Vicky Isley and Paul Smith aka boredomresearch, which uses real live snails equipped with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags to deliver electronic messages. The project was commissioned as part of the Tagged Exhibition in Space Media Arts, London in 2006 and was developed during boredomresearchs’ research fellowship in the Computer Animation Research Centre at Bournemouth University. The installation version of Real Snail Mail was displayed at SIGGRAPH08 in Los Angeles (11–15 August 2008), at the British Science Festival (14–19 September 2009), and at [DAM]Berlin as part of boredomresearch’s solo exhibition, ‘Chasing Stillness’ (29 August - 24 October 2009). How it works Each snail "agent" is fitted with a RFID tag on its shell. Users of the service send a message via the Real Snail Mail website which is routed to the tank to await collection by a snail "agent". As the snails wander around the tank, they come into range of a RFID reader, which assigns the e-mail message to the RFID tag. The references to the electronic messages are then physically carried around the tank by the snails until one of them passes close to a second reader. As soon as this happens, the second reader triggers the message to be forwarded over the net in the usual way. External links homepage of the project. homepage of the artists. project blog. Further reading Time Magazine Esquire BBC News ‘Chasing Stillness’, Foreword by Carl Honoré, [DAM] Berlin, 2009 ‘Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time’ CNN.com DigitalBiz article by Cherise Fong, 3 November 2008 ‘Playing games without frontiers’ CNN.com DigitalBiz article by Cherise Fong, 3 October 2008 ‘Vicky Isley of BoredomResearch.net, which has created what it calls Real Snail Mail’ The Bob Rivers Show Interview on 102.5 KZOK, 19 August 2008 BBC WorldServices Radio Interview, 7 August 2008 Interview with BBC Newsround 23 July 2008, 5.00-5.15pm ‘The Wired Campus: Real Snail Mail’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 June 2008 ‘Real Snail Mail’ Slashdot, 24 June 2008 ‘Real Snail Mail turns email into slower email’, Neural.it, 07 November 2017 ‘Snail mail, brought to you by real snails’ The Inquirer, 20 June 2008 ‘SIGGRAPH Galleries Explore Architecture, Art, Design & Computation’ SIGGRAPH Press Release by Brian Ban, 19 June 2008 ‘Snail (And We Do Mean Snail) Mail’ Discovery News: Etherized Blog, 18 June 2008 ‘Real Snail Mail’ New Scientist Technology Blog,