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Spam plants thrive in the art world

He doesn't use Photoshop but simply writes code to create computer art. For the spam plants, he parsed the data within junk email -- including subject lines, headers and footers -- to detect relationships between that data. Then he visually represents those relationships.

For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an email sender and matches those numbers to a colour chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a colour, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the colour of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it's sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant's ability to grow, Dragulescu said.

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.

"I mapped it in a way to control the complexity of the plant," he said.

Drag's history lesson
Dragulescu moved from Romania to the US in 1997 to study film, photography and art history at Ithaca College. While there, he taught himself computer animation and programming, and after graduation, took a job in San Francisco writing code and working on Web, multimedia and game design. That's when he seized on the idea of using algorithms to harness the Net's mountains of data and produce art.

After the dot-com bust, Dragulescu earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of California, San Diego. There, he studied computer science, cognitive science, media theory and visual arts and was inspired to experiment with art and data from the Net, including spam, music and blogs.

One project from CRCA is called Scalable City, which creates procedural game assets and environments.

Now he's working on taking the same principles and applying them to text and literature, so that one day he can create a visual image of a Hemingway novel, for example.

He recently completed a project in music visualisation called Extrusions in C Major. The project creates images from Mozart compositions. To do this, the software analyses the note characteristics of the music, including the tempo of various instruments, and then pairs them with colours: white for piano, yellow for violin and blue for cello.

With Blogbot, though it's not finished, he's already created a first graphical novel, called What I Did Last Summer. The piece draws on writings about the war in Iraq from soldiers who have maintained blogs. To make the program even more sophisticated for his next novel, Dragulescu is learning computational linguistics methods to understand the logic and emotions embedded in language.

Strangely enough, his interest in language analysis started with spam.

"Spam is a random piece of literature, it has unseen effects, it changes all the time. And it's led me to see text differently."