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

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

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

[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.

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.

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:Spam != Art

[tehwebguy]

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

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.