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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. "

3 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. 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.

  3. 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.