Slashdot Mirror
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.
"
Not worth viewing imo. I like viewing cool art. I don't know what this is. I would have expected the art to show some correlation between the spam messages and image.
Just $.02
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
You didn't rtfa did ya?
The size of the message might determine how bushy the plant is. Certain keywords, such as "Nigerian," might trigger more branches. But Dragulescu did not inject any irony. Messages about Viagra do not grow taller, for example.
He didn't want to grow hairy palm trees
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I admit that it wasn't much, but it's still art that found spam useful.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
For a thesis project in undergrad, I did some work with chaos and the mandelbrot and julia sets. These numbers really do produce some beautiful pictures. But the pictures that were produced was not the art, but the math and code that drove them.
With nothing else to show, it looks like he got some computer generated building blocks and glued them together.
In his book Musiques formelles, the composer Iannis Xenakis defined music as the operation of group theory concepts on sound. This is the only definition wide enough to encompass all that has ever been called music. Xenakis himself derived most of his works from certain automated processes, whether probabilities in "Eonta" or the Fibonacci sequence in "Metastasis", for example. Xenakis was able to show a long historical lineage for his aesthetic, going all the way back to the Pythagoreans at the earliest. Though it stood in contrast to certain subsequently ascendent musical styles, it was hardly a modern concept. And it certainly still involved skill and imagination, since the composer still had to grapple with orchestration, had to assign mathematical values to a certain range of pitches, etc.
With regards to the visual arts, couldn't we simply adapt Xenakis' definition to say that it is the operation of group theory on images? And even when he uses certain information as the basis of a work, the artist still has to decide many things about it on his own. Skill and imagination don't ever disappear completely.
I want a new email reader that creates an image of all incoming emails using this technique and displays a thumbnail image beside each message. Once I was used to it, I could probably figure out which messages were spam just by looking at the resulting flower. Function and beauty in one.
It would work kinda like most baysian filters that give a percent likelyhood that a message is spam, except the prettier the flower, the more likely a message is spam.
Sure it's a waste of CPU cycles, but it would make recieving spam much more pleasurable.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Another take on webcomics from spam: http://www.apophenia-prime.com/. This one tries to tell a story without words, with each page depicting a line from a spam email. Readers are encouraged to send in their dialogue, and good interpretations are posted. Just an interesting contrast to Spamusement's take of getting a joke out of the absurd lines in spam.
I like to compare fractals to photography. A photographer takes a machine (camera) and uses his skill with the machine to take pictures of the real world. The pictures can be purely documentary (imagine technical documentation) or artistic, or anything in between.
A "fractalist" (for lack of any better term) uses a machine (computer) and his skill with the machine and his knowledge of math to take "pictures" of a purely mathematical world. Again, the pictures can range from purely documentary shots for a math textbook to art.
Of course, in both cases, the purely documentary shots can still be beautiful or interesting for a layman, and an artist can purposely explore this, therefore turning the documentary pictures into art.
AccountKiller