Spam plants thrive in the art world

Most people see Viagra ads and Nigerian email scams as more data to delete. Alex Dragulescu sees art.

For several years, the Romanian-born computer artist has applied techniques in computational modelling and information visualisation 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 email 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 analysing 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 US security. Information visualisation 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 visualisation methods to make art shows how technology changes art, he said.

"My efforts [have been] to expose the ubiquitous forms in which data and technology are both actively and passively shaping the ways we perceive and construct ourselves and others," Dragulescu said.

Spam, for example, has so blemished and clogged an otherwise revolutionary new form of communication that scientists have taken to storing and studying it in recent years. That's why, Dragulescu said, he decided to analyse it for artistic purposes and try to expose the hidden nature of junk email, with its duplicitous headers and subject lines.