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.
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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!"
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.