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One Man's Spam Is Another Man's Art

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bah-i-used-spam-as-art-in-college dept.

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. "

6 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm, guess the spam by phorm · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  2. Can't wait by partenon · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    --
    ilex paraguariensis for all
  3. Random Art based on the not so Random? by Goblez · · Score: 3, Funny
    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.

    --
    - Kal`Goblez
  4. How does your garden grow? by zentinal · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. I need to get more sleep by Digital+Vomit · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    --
    Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
  6. Re:Sorry. by Mr.+Essen · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.