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

As for Slashdot...

[yourOneManArmy]

So now we can find a use for half the posts on here by making them into art. Fantastic.

Artwork generation through filtered random numbers

[kruhft]

This is an interesting take on something that I find quite inspiriing, where one removes the human from the creation process and replaces the randomness of their actions with some other form of generator (spam email ins this case, or a call to random() in the case of a number of my current works) and observes what results. It moves the artist from creator to judge or producer; the program has no idea whether what it has done is good and it would be almost impossible to write a program to recognize "good art", but as humans we are very capapble of making such a decision very quickly given our ability to solve NP problems almost instantly at times.

I write programs that generate art, and I choose what's good or not to represent myself in artwork. I wrote the programs along the lines of how I would make art, let it run and pick the best pieces. I am still nagged with a bit of guilt about whether I created them or not, but I would say that I did, because without my work the works would never have existed, so I am comfortable with saying that I created them.

Someone above said this is not artwork due to a couple of things, one of them being that true art work requires emotion during it's creation; I beg to differ in that true artwork *invokes* some sort of emotional response in the viewer and the emotions or lack there of during it's creation are somewhat irrelevant (although, granted, I have made some pretty amazing art when trying to get some emotions out). The computer that generates the pieces doesn't have emotions, but if the piece it makes creates emotions, then I would say that yes it is art, and the program that created it...well, I'm not quite sure what to call that, but I've been liking the term mini-soul lately.

A shameless plug for some of my work that's been made along similar lines as this would be my Programmed Piano EP which consists of 4 songs played by computer programs and my Genpaper series which were image compositions created programmatically using a shell script.

The main point of these works was to test a theory of mine that in the end we are all just random number generators our thermodynamic core, but that randomness is filtered amd amplified through various means and processes and as such we then become *us* to the world. These works used filtered random numbers to create art in ways that I would create art; in effect I created a part of myself inside the computer to do work for me, but I would never claim that I could create the same pieces as the programs did, but they sure were a lot faster and ended up being pretty good at what they did.

Not bad for programs less than 10-20 lines long. Hopefully this was somewhat cohoerent since I'm in a pre-coffee state of mind.

--
kruhft
www.myspace.com/kruhft GOdisaDM LP coming very soon.