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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. Sorry. by lottameez · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Sorry. by MrSquirrel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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. It's an interesting concept, especially how it "grows".

      Now if only it compiled the images as large bitmaps, distributed them globally through a shared system of thousands of computers, then bombarded the offending spammer's IP with lots of pretty pictures that he/she helped create.

      --
      A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
    2. Re:Sorry. by shreevatsa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's much more correlation between the spam's (literal, not intended ;) text and the "art", at http://spamusement.com/. "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!"

  2. Re:No, this is not art by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    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.

  3. I want a new email reader... by jhfry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  4. Apophenia by yuvi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.