Spam (not the food item) as art (Dialup warning)

[n2doc]

E-mail spam as a masterpiece in the making
A Romanian artist uses special algorithms to turn the text of unsolicited e-mail into digital images.





By Stacy A. Teicher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Don't let the spam get you down. With the right touch, an annoying message can become a masterpiece.

When Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu looks at junk e-mails, he sees patterns - bits and bytes that can be manipulated into colorful plantlike images or stark architectural forms.

As a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, he and fellow student Tim Jaeger collected spam and used it to create live multimedia shows of sound, text, and animation - "like a VJ and DJ performance," Mr. Dragulescu says in a phone interview.

Computer languages and algorithms are ubiquitous in our lives, but they're hidden, Dragulescu says, so his projects are intended to "expose" them. "Spam was this material that was discarded and hated by everybody. It was good material for us ... and then I said, 'What else can I do with this?' "

more:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0720/p16s01-stct.html

http://www.sq.ro/