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Artist turns mortgage loan and Viagra spam into art

By David Moye

March 20, 2006

San Diego--Art is in the eye of the beholder and a UCSD graduate is actually making annoying spam e-mails worth looking at.

Alex Dragulescu earned a Master of Fine Arts degree last May, in part, because he created a new art form called “Psuedocode” that translates ASCII test characters into artistic commands.

He inputs a spam e-mail for, say, Viagra, into the computer, decides on an image he wants to create – such as an exotic flower or a structural image – and leaves the details to his computer.

Dragulescu admits the idea came during one of those light bulb moments when he was looking for projects to do that would satisfy the requirements for his MFA degree. It didn’t take long to program and he was surprised by the results.

Still, he admits the idea of turning annoying spam into pretty pictures created a lot of critical reaction among his instructors and fellow students. “But they were mostly theoretical,” he adds. “And I got my degree, so I guess I passed.”

Now the spam art is generating a ton of ideas in his head about future applications. Dragulescu is considering applying the Psuedocode process to pieces of great literature and has already working on musical applications.”

Last summer, Dragulescu and a colleague traveled around Europe and performed at various festivals by turning a database of 60,000 different spam e-mails into animated visuals and musical compositions at various festivals.

There are plans to do a similar project in May at a Carlsbad festival and Dragulescu is considering a program that would automatically take spam letters and turn them into artistic screensavers as they arrive in the inbox.

Dragulescu’s work can be seen at www.sq.ro and he will be lecturing on pseudocode on March 25 at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center on March 25.

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