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.
"
The only way to make Spam art involves carving canned ham!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
I'm guessing that this generated image was a result of enlargment/viagara ads.
All-in-all, the plants look cooler than the other ads, but I think a video showing the plant 'growing' with spam would be more interesting than the stills
One mans garbage is another mans trash allright.
My humor is probably your flamebait
Viagra branch, Rolex Branch, stock tip branch, home loan branch, cheap meds branch, ad nausium
Rick B.
This is AWESOME. I just can't wait for cars that are moved by spam.
ilex paraguariensis for all
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.
My blog
So the Importnat question is: what colors/styles do the porn map to? Because I'm betting you see a fair amount of 'art' generated directly from that.
- Kal`Goblez
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
The drawings take on certain characteristics based on the spam - I'd be curious if this could be used in future spam filtering. You could get your daily filtering reports in pretty pictures instead of bar graphs!
That's not the only thing you can make grow with Viagra now.
I'll take three boxes... for my, uh, garden...
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Image 2 looks pretty cool, a cross between hens-and-chicks and ice plant or maybe an anemone
Image 1 looks like something those m3dz are supposed to do for the below average male.
Image 6 reminds me of something I pulled out of the liver of a lake perch (wonder how that thing lived, make sure you cook fish thoroughly!)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Images 1,2, and 6 were excellent. Spam never looked so good.
#2 Reminded me of clownfish.
Now if we could only make money off of deleting our spam, it would be a beautiful thing.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I'm a gardener. This makes perfect sense to me. After all, it takes goodly amounts of s*it to produce beautiful flowers and foliage.
Several of the images really just use the spam as a random number generator.
Maybe I can use spam to randomize a game of online poker and make the front page of slashdot, too!
Flamebait would have been saying something like "This crappy excuse for art could only have been done using some awful Mapplethorpe-esque combination of Al Gore, Linux, and CR-APple." (That was going to be in my next post).
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
looks more like fungus to me.
These images certaintly illustrate the random nature of most spam. I wonder what images generated from real email would look like. Now all alex has to do is give his algorithm to google so they can show a pretty picture on the sidebar when you are viewing yor spam box in gmail. Mmmm.... Beautiful Spam.
This almost moved me to tears from my laughing...
--------
From: Shera Kyle
Date: May 26, 2006 4:22 PM
Subject: Latest Softwares Such as Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2, Visual Studio 2005 Server Workgroup, Mathworks Matlab R2006a, from $15, Instant Download! idea
To: *******************.com
showed miserable thank longer god. convenient sandwich latter oh? goodbye parents central room twenty-one.
welcome miss rich. trees however burst happen again.
telling letter yours bridge? forty letter promised between. filled satisfaction as teacher ran.
side got place tears make benefit? telling prettier drew went.
social gray miss completely i age. come different spent certain you.
-------
The spammers, always eager to make a buck, will sue him for royalties on the "derivative work."
Don't laugh, I'm surprised it hasn't happened.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I need to get more sleep. I read the article title as "One Man's Sperm Is Another Man's Art"
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
It sounds like he used the spam as a very complex RNG. He could probably use random() and get similar results...
I was expecting this story to link to http://www.spamusement.com/ ... "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!"
I print out all my spam, then use it for heating the house in winter, or global warming in the summer. So spam is useful if you print it out.
1011 1010 1101 1100 0000 1111 1111 1110 1110
> "... 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. "
/dev/urandom. I still wonder why they looked like brownian motion...
One time I did a spline interpolation of dots with coordinates I took from
It should obviously be done with code instead, *THAT* be a hell of a lot more interesting. Imaging pitting XNU vs BSD vs Linux in a *gasp* art contest where the art is representing the code. THAT be much more geeky and slashdot-worthy:)
I think the pictures look neat. They'd make some nice wall papers and even backdrops for different movies depending on the content.
I do agree with what one poster said earlier that the software itself is art to a good extent, but if this were setup as a tool for people to play with you'd probebly see people putting in different types of input to produce different results. Wither it's a brush on a canvis or strings of ascii text to function call, it's all input of some form. Who knows, maybe the next big thing will come from this? As long as the guy enjoyed what he did I'm happy for him and nice job.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
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.
I dunno, if spam is smart enough to get through my filters, I usually take the time to read whatever quasi-poetic method it used to get through them. Some of them are surprisingly gripping.
Do you see what I did there?
I guess I'd better patent this fast!
Now I can have legit art for my MySpace background :-/
One Man's Spam Is Another Man's Art
I read spam as sperm, blech. I need more sleep.
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.
But I do wonder if "Viagra" makes the plant grow taller and more erect.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here's a question: If you create a derivative work, but in such a way that no "useful" information about the original work(s) upon which it was based can be reconstructed, can it still be sued over? For instance, if I took The DaVinci Code book, and rearranged all of the letters in it to be in alphabetical order, and published it (with no references ot The DaVinci Code, except perhaps a small disclaimer in the aknowledgements section), would this be illegal without permission? I see this art as the same type of thing - sure it's based on someone else's work, but there's no way in hell I can figure out what the spammers were writing from those pictures, in fact I'm not even sure it's possible that examining pictures made by this process could determine whether the process was fed with spam or non-spam emails of similar length!
Considering the spam I get becomes more and more nonsensical, how about using incoming spam as an entropy source for /dev/random?
The pictures shown contain various observable patterns (such as areas of darker color, that look like "nodes"). Considering that the data used in the display was based entirely on spam, it is expected that the aforementioned patterns correlate in meaningful ways. All you would need to know is the "key", or formula used to generate the image...
Navigate your Inbox via spamtree: email from existing contacts collects in bright shiney flowers, while spam becomes part of ugly growing flowers that can be "cut" and sent to the Trash folder.
Keeping your Inbox clean would be analogous in a direct way with tending a garden.
Pick your own metaphor and run with it, the concept could be taken a few places...
Reality is prettier inside my head...
It makes me wonder if anyone has considered using spam to generate entropy for cryptography.
The pictures are genuinely interesting, but I seriously wonder whether the spam input plays any important role in their appearance. I'll bet he could just as easily have used Wall Street Journal editorials, or transcriptions of chess games, or digitized music waveforms, or, quite possibly, random numbers.
It's rather like the phony "participative" art... like the staircase they have, or used to have, at the Boston Museum of Science, where descending the steps interrupts light beams and creates wind-chime-like music. You sense a connection between your actions and the music, and for about fifteen seconds it's cool, but then you gradually realize that you aren't really controlling the music or pouring anything meaningful of your own into the artwork.
For that matter, it's like a wind chime. The aural experience is shaped far more by the designer of the chime than by the wind.
Or... for one more analogy... is this really different from the Andy O'Meara's G-Force visualization plugin for MP3 players... or the 1930's "color organs?"
The annoying part is that the most novel aspect is the claimed connection with spam. Because of the novelty of using spam as the semi-random seeding function, I believe he's probably managed to get much more notice of his art than if he had used something less novel.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Just make it useful. Now the spammers will probably use some IP law to prevent this "unauthorized" use of their copyrighted material.
What?
Some of these are really priceless. I got one about a Cuban guy who wanted to start a revolution once, just the other day I got a funny one that was a ton of semi-random words, but it was hilarious still.
Maybe I am easily amused.
Great Intellect...
Did anyone else misread this as "one man's sperm is another man's art"!!?!?!?
Libertas in infinitum
My thought was they'd smell the chance at a buck and sue. Heck, if they even got a 0.1% success rate it would still be better than spamming. Fortunately for the artist, the cost of filing a frivilous lawsuit is more than millipennies per victim.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
>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?
No, because group theory is not sufficient to describe the reason a picture of a naked woman is beautiful.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
but it does have to be about naked women.
my password really is 'stinkypants'