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I know that you think
I’ve lost my mind after reading the title of this article and perhaps
that’s not so far from the truth. However, I will plunge forward and
tell you something that perhaps could be considered an oxymoron: In spite
of what we think there is beauty to be found within spam messages.
 There
is a Romanian gentleman by the name of Alex Dragulescu who according to
his website (www.sq.ro)
is a “visual artist whose practice embraces both the traditional
and new media.” It seems that Alex is a artist/mathematician who began
to see patterns in the words that were used in spam messages. His
experimental art is an attempt to translate those patterns into something
approaching art. He has a BS degree in Cinema and Photography from Ithaca
College in Ithaca, NY and a Masters of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the
University of California at San Diego.
I can’t tell you how
he does it exactly, but here’s what I’ve been able to learn after
reading up on the guy. Every email that goes out has a header record that
indicates the server it was sent from, the time, date and other important
information that you and I never see. Our computer normally shields each
of us from this techno-babble and is very difficult to read unless you are
a computer. Taking the header information along with the subject lines and
the bodies of the emails, Alex assigns values to those bits of data and
after examining thousands and thousands of spam messages he has written a
computer program that allows him to assign colors and values to the words
he finds. Then he manipulates the results in such a way that pictures
emerge from the morass of words and numbers.
He’s created a series
of pictures called ‘Spam Plants’ which is how I found him and they are
beautiful. They look like sea creatures to me, but maybe you would see
something else. Using the same software, he created another series of
pictures called ‘Spam Architecture’, which are just as amazing.
I’m not usually one
to spend a lot of time looking at abstract art. I’m one of those people
who knows what he likes to look at and I tend to relate better to the
masters such as Da Vinci, Monet, or Van Gogh. I don’t spend a lot of
time looking for the hidden meanings or codes or whatever else it is that
high-brow folks see in art. I just know what I like to see and there are
several specific pieces of art that I like to look at over and over again.
Modern art usually confuses me, but I’ve always enjoyed seeing what
someone could do especially if it catches my eye.
 About
15 years ago, I was receiving packs of advertising cards in the mail that
offered everything from gadgets to pre-printed labels and all sorts of
other stuff that computer geeks might need. I used to love to get them and
I couldn’t wait to go through them and see the latest and greatest stuff
for sale. In one of those packets I found an advertisement for a
computerized print named ‘The Wave Of The Future”. To this day
I don’t know the artist who did it, but it was a rendition of Katsushika
Hokusai’s Great Wave (one in a series called 36 Views From Mt.
Fuji). It showed a tsunami wave with a fishing boat caught in it
headed for land. In the print for sale, the left third was of the original
painting, the middle third was pixelated in tiny squares and the right
third had changed into a wire-frame computer drawing. I had to have it so
I ordered it immediately and upon receiving it; I had it framed in a black
metal frame and hung it on my office wall.
A
few months later, I received another packet of sales cards and in this one
I found a version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night named ‘The State Of
The Art” rendered in a similar fashion but vertical instead of
horizontal. In effect, the bottom third of the print was the original
painting, the middle third was pixelated and the top third with the stars
was computer wireframe. I bought this one and had it framed so that it
matched ‘The Wave Of The Future” print I purchased earlier.
These
two prints have hung in every office I’ve every been in and if I have
anything to do with it, they will continue to grace our offices for years
to come. I’ve searched on the Internet for years to discover the
artist’s name to no avail, but I have learned that I’m not the only
one who loves these prints. In fact, there are many people interested in
finding copies of them. But I ain’t selling!
So
what does all of this talk about art have to do with computers? Nothing
really. In fact, if you study “The Wave of The Future” and ‘The
State of The Art” you suddenly are struck by the fact that none of the
work was actually done by a computer. It’s all done by hand. Each
pixel block is hand painted and if you look closely enough, you can even
see the pencil marks where the artist drew out each block by hand before
painting it. The realization that something that looks technical can
actually not be technical at all has always struck me deep in my spirit
and I’ve been drawn to that concept as I realize on a daily basis that
what I do for a living is often that way. I’ve always said that being a
computer guru is 90% people and 10% technical and I wonder if that concept
came from my appreciation of the art that I surround myself with.
 There
is a print of a collage on my wall overlooking my desk that done by an
artist named Martin Patton who owns Lagniappe
Gallery near Gatlinburg, TN. It’s a picture of a mountain cabin in
the woods but it is a collage made out of little bits of paper torn out of
magazines and meticulously matched for color and shading to make up the
whole picture. Standing on the far side of my office, it simply looks like
a idyllic mountain setting but as you draw closer, the individual bits of
paper jump out at you and you can’t help but be amazed at the attention
to detail and the ability of the artist to create something from nothing.
Which
brings me back to Alex
Dragulescu and his “Spam Plants.” He makes beautiful pictures out of
spam messages, which is where I would least expect to find beauty. And in
the end, isn’t art about finding beauty where you least expect it?
Visit www.tpcqpc.com
to find this article and links to Alex’s art.
Paul
H. Tarver
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