GEEK: Art, thy name is spam
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.
Now he’s working on a software agent that can “write” experimental graphical novels based on a melange of text culled from thousands of like-minded blogs across the Net. When finished, the agent, called Blogbot, will include algorithms that apply computational linguistics to the blog text, so that it extracts meaning from the text. That way, the graphical novel might strike on profundity.
“By analyzing text using computational linguistics methods, you can detect anger and sadness. Turning those into gestures in three dimensions, that would be interesting,” said Dragulescu, who is now head of the Experimental Game Lab, a research lab at the Center For Research and Computing and the Arts (CRCA) within the University of California at San Diego.
Dragulescu’s work stands out at a time when scientists and technologists are struggling to harness the massive quantities of data online and make sense of it for fields like earth science, drug discovery, genetic research and U.S. security. Information visualization is a traditional scientific method that’s getting a lot of attention now because it involves projecting a visual image of the data so that onlookers can make connections that might otherwise be lost.
Making such conceptual leaps is often associated with art, and for Dragulescu, that’s the point. Using scientific visualization methods to make art shows how technology changes art, he said.
READ: One man’s spam is another’s art
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