Slashdot Mirror
One Man's Spam Is Another Man's Art
mytrip writes "Most people see Viagra ads and Nigerian scams as simply more e-mail to delete. Alex Dragulescu sees art.
For the last several years, the Romanian-born computer artist has applied techniques in computational modeling and information visualization to invent a new form of artistic expression. One of his more notable projects involved creating what he calls Spam Plants. He wrote algorithms that analyzed various text and data points of junk e-mail to produce "organic" images of plantlike structures that spontaneously grew based on incoming spam.
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Oh for fucks sake, shut the fuck up. I can't believe people are still bringing out this stupid fucking definition nowadays. You haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about.
And yes, that's about the level of reasoning my argument should contain, because that's about the level of reasoning you're putting into it.
It's art if someone says it is! Drop this absolutist crap already.
But therein lies the artistic point, doesn't it? I hate to be too art-schooly (actually, I don't, I quite enjoy it), but there is obviously something much more behind what you say. These pictures are beautiful, but they can be just as beautiful if generated by other input, say for instance love-letters, the collected works of Shakespeare, or the Bill of Rights. But also spam. We think of spam as somehow less valuble, less good than these other things, but one could argue (and that is what I think the artist does with his art) that this is only because we choose to look at it from this perspective. The words themselves, when broken down to atomic form, has no intrinsic meaning (they are just a permutation of gplyphs drawn from a set of 25), they only provide an isomorphic mapping with some (very human) concepts. But the words themselves are just dots and curves and lines. If we remove this familiar mapping, and transform the words into shapes that have no meaning to us we see that this is only a construct of the human mind. Since (I assume) there is another isomorpic mapping between the words and the shapes (one input becomes only one shape, and a shape can come only from one specific input) there is no semantic difference (that is to say, there are no difference in meaning), only a difference in grammar (or form, more accuratly). Get it?
A lot of people complain, indeed a number of them in this story (note: I'm not referring to the parent), that this kind of art, modern art, is stupid, simplistic, masturbatory and only for some bored richpeople who hasn't worked an honest day in their lives. Well, they are wrong, and if you say that you are an asshole. Fine, you don't get modern art, that's ok, you don't have to. But there are people that do care about this, and they care very deeply. They spend their whole lives pursuing art, and they do not deserve to be spat on by people who "don't get it". It's arrogant, it's mean-spirited, it's disrespectful and plain ignorant.
Slashdotters don't appriciate it when people tell them they are wasting away their lives surfing the web, learning obscure programming languages, playing computer games, etc. So stop behaving like dicks to other people then!