the binary plants of alex dragulescu

alex dragulescu takes data that arrives in his in-box and transforms it from its humdrum binary sets into things of beauty. by applying techniques in computational modeling and information visualization he has created an entirely new form of artistic expression. visiting dragulescu’s website reveals an extraordinary set of five galleries, each devoted to recording the results of transforming digital rubbish into art.

begin with malwarez in which he has transformed worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code into organisms. for each piece of disassembled code, api calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. he then maps their frequency, density and grouping to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual organism.

here are three examples . . .


more here . . .

then i recommend moving on to the very pretty “spam plants”. “spam plants” grow out of the ascii values found in the text of spam messages which in turn determine the attributes and qualities of the “plants” . . .


more here . . .

right now he's working on a software agent that can "write" experimental graphical novels based on a melange of text culled from thousands of like-minded blogs across the net. the program, called blogbot, applies computational linguistics to the blog text, so that it extracts meaning from the text. the results of his first project with blogbot are here.