Week 6 Research - Reagan Franzoni

The artist I chose for week 6 from the Museum of Computer Art is Alex Dragulescu. He is a Romanian visual artist who experiments with algorithms, computational models, stimulations, and information visuals involving data from databases, spam emails, blogs, video games, etc. His work represents the traditional media and new modern media. He works with a software tool called Blogbot that he received an IBM Media Award for because of its expansion of media in Germany. Dragulescu attended the University of California and received a degree from the Ithaca College of Fine Arts and Visual Arts in Photography and Cinema studies. He now is a researcher for the MIT Media social group lab. Alex Dragulescu uses images from junk email to create his spam art series that are designed from his Blogbot computer generator. It takes patterns, keywords, and sound movements in the text and spam and it converts it into three-dimensional models. This generator takes the spam that everyone receives and does not want and turns it into art. Dragulescu controls the random spam generated models by coding with color, setting his camera up at different angles in the virtual program, and uses different lighting effects to add more shadowing and dimensional effects. 

The image I chose from Alex Dragulescu’s collection of three-dimensional spam and virtual junk mail algorithms is called “Stormy Malicious.” It is from his series of visualizations of worms, viruses, and spyware codes. Each pattern is mapped out to each input of the algorithm and it creates a 3-Dimensional existing object. Each pattern influences the configuration of the object that is defined in this series, which is living organisms and viruses. The image that I chose of a blue 3-Dimensional link of organisms looks to represent the viruses that are injected into software programs. The model is a symbol of viruses on a computer represented by a living virus cell made up of algorithms of coded viruses implanted into computer programs generated from the Blogbot software system that Dragulescu uses. It looks like he may have played around with lighting to give the model shadows and depth within the image. 

Link to Alex Dragulescu’s Website:

http://sq.ro/

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