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

No, this is not art

[pieterh]

Art is, at the very least, the use of skill and imagination in the creation of objects.

When one writes a program that produces pictures, the software may itself be art, but the pictures it produces are not.

I'd go further and say that 'good art' also requires the input of emotion, and the stronger the emotion, and the more the viewer feels this emotion, the better the art in many cases. We engineers also produce objects with skill and imagination, but we are not artists.

Re:No, this is not art

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Many people consider Fractals to be art.

Math is a program

Re:No, this is not art

[Phreakiture]

I disagree.

Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others"

That being the case, the skill of the artist's programming and selection of input for the program (by choosing spam instead of, say, joke forwards or urban legend forwards) has resulted in the creation of an aesthetic, though virtual, object.

Now the spammers will sue for copyright

[davidwr]

The spammers, always eager to make a buck, will sue him for royalties on the "derivative work."

Don't laugh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened.

Re:Sorry.

[mrxak]

It's an interesting concept, but not particularly related to spam. Sure, the spam is the input, but the input could be anything. If you ask me, the guy did the art part of the project long before spam got involved with it.

Methinks the "spam" aspect is a gimmick.

[dpbsmith]

The pictures are genuinely interesting, but I seriously wonder whether the spam input plays any important role in their appearance. I'll bet he could just as easily have used Wall Street Journal editorials, or transcriptions of chess games, or digitized music waveforms, or, quite possibly, random numbers.

It's rather like the phony "participative" art... like the staircase they have, or used to have, at the Boston Museum of Science, where descending the steps interrupts light beams and creates wind-chime-like music. You sense a connection between your actions and the music, and for about fifteen seconds it's cool, but then you gradually realize that you aren't really controlling the music or pouring anything meaningful of your own into the artwork.

For that matter, it's like a wind chime. The aural experience is shaped far more by the designer of the chime than by the wind.

Or... for one more analogy... is this really different from the Andy O'Meara's G-Force visualization plugin for MP3 players... or the 1930's "color organs?"

The annoying part is that the most novel aspect is the claimed connection with spam. Because of the novelty of using spam as the semi-random seeding function, I believe he's probably managed to get much more notice of his art than if he had used something less novel.