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

Spam != Art

[ArcherB]

The only way to make Spam art involves carving canned ham!

Re:Spam != Art

[tehwebguy]

this guy admits that his drawings are not good, but i think it is funny stuff: http://www.spamusement.com/

Sorry.

[lottameez]

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

Re:Sorry.

[MrSquirrel]

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.

Re:Sorry.

[shreevatsa]

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!"

Re:Sorry.

[mrxak]

It's an interesting concept, but not particularly related to spam. Sure, the spam is the input, but the input could be anything. If you ask me, the guy did the art part of the project long before spam got involved with it.

Re:Sorry.

[Mr. Essen]

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.

Well, I bet he didn't want to end up with too many penis plants.

Hmm, guess the spam

[phorm]

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

Re:Hmm, guess the spam

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

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

Can't wait

[partenon]

This is AWESOME. I just can't wait for cars that are moved by spam.

No, this is not art

[pieterh]

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.

Re:No, this is not art

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Many people consider Fractals to be art.

Math is a program

Re:No, this is not art

[rickett81]

I wish the article had gone into a little more detail about how it was created.

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.

Re:No, this is not art

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:No, this is not art

[Phreakiture]

I disagree.

Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others"

That being the case, the skill of the artist's programming and selection of input for the program (by choosing spam instead of, say, joke forwards or urban legend forwards) has resulted in the creation of an aesthetic, though virtual, object.

Re:No, this is not art

[lahvak]

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.

Random Art based on the not so Random?

[Goblez]

So this is a form of autogenerating content, but instead of being based on something random it's based on spam. So then it really depends all upon the mapping he uses.

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.

Finally.

[AltGrendel]

Someone found something useful about spam.

I admit that it wasn't much, but it's still art that found spam useful.

filtering?

[yapplejax]

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!

How does your garden grow?

[zentinal]

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.

Now the spammers will sue for copyright

[davidwr]

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.

I need to get more sleep

[Digital Vomit]

I need to get more sleep. I read the article title as "One Man's Sperm Is Another Man's Art"

Re:I need to get more sleep

[elbenito69]

I thought that too, and then remembered that it's come true already... the album covers for Metallica's Load and Reload albums are blood and sperm between plates of glass.

Print Spam

[badc0ffee]

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.

I want a new email reader...

[jhfry]

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.

Apophenia

[yuvi]

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.

Methinks the "spam" aspect is a gimmick.

[dpbsmith]

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.