Spam art

For the last several years, Romanian-born computer artiste Alex Dragulescu 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 analysed various text and data points of junk e-mail to produce ‘organic’ images of plant-like 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 texts culled from thousands of like-minded blogs across the internet. 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 would be interesting,” said Dragulescu, who is now head of the Experimental Game Lab, a research lab at the Centre 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 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.