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: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.