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. "

Comments

Spam != Art

[ArcherB]

The only way to make Spam art involves carving canned ham!

Hmm, guess the spam

[phorm]

I'm guessing that this generated image was a result of enlargment/viagara ads.

All-in-all, the plants look cooler than the other ads, but I think a video showing the plant 'growing' with spam would be more interesting than the stills

Can't wait

[partenon]

This is AWESOME. I just can't wait for cars that are moved by spam.

Random Art based on the not so Random?

[Goblez]

So this is a form of autogenerating content, but instead of being based on something random it's based on spam. So then it really depends all upon the mapping he uses.

So the Importnat question is: what colors/styles do the porn map to? Because I'm betting you see a fair amount of 'art' generated directly from that.

filtering?

[yapplejax]

The drawings take on certain characteristics based on the spam - I'd be curious if this could be used in future spam filtering. You could get your daily filtering reports in pretty pictures instead of bar graphs!

How does your garden grow?

[zentinal]

I'm a gardener. This makes perfect sense to me. After all, it takes goodly amounts of s*it to produce beautiful flowers and foliage.

Bizarre spam I recieved, almost poetry

[Anonymous Coward]

This almost moved me to tears from my laughing...

--------
From: Shera Kyle
Date: May 26, 2006 4:22 PM
Subject: Latest Softwares Such as Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2, Visual Studio 2005 Server Workgroup, Mathworks Matlab R2006a, from $15, Instant Download! idea
To: *******************.com

showed miserable thank longer god. convenient sandwich latter oh? goodbye parents central room twenty-one.
welcome miss rich. trees however burst happen again.
telling letter yours bridge? forty letter promised between. filled satisfaction as teacher ran.
side got place tears make benefit? telling prettier drew went.
social gray miss completely i age. come different spent certain you.

-------

I need to get more sleep

[Digital Vomit]

I need to get more sleep. I read the article title as "One Man's Sperm Is Another Man's Art"

Print Spam

[badc0ffee]

I print out all my spam, then use it for heating the house in winter, or global warming in the summer. So spam is useful if you print it out.

Re:Sorry.

[Mr. Essen]

His program just analyzes the spam words and then makes pretty pictures from them. It's not like the spam message says "dog" so the program draws a dog... the word dog might make the program create a blue line for example, but nothing really dog-related.

Well, I bet he didn't want to end up with too many penis plants.