Dorothy R. Santos

Now, imagine the spam above used to create art.

A few posts back, I shared a performance/video art based on spam messaging. This time around, I wanted to post about artist, Alex Dragulescu. He’s been featured on c|net and USA Today. His art has been around for some time but it’s so àpropos considering my recent obsession fascination with the messages filtered as spam via my (blog) comments inbox. Spam is spam but every now and again, I receive a message I’m convinced some artist has remixed into something quite interesting. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that an artist has already done this. Dragulescu re-imagines and contextualizes what is virtually useless but potentially malicious to the common end-user. From computer viruses to intricate coding, his work turns spam messaging into a commentary on language, computational processing, and data visualization.

The following artworks created by Dragulescu (click on the images to learn more about him and his work). Specifically, the images below were generated from the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) values contained in spam messaging.