Interesting article from wired magazine on data visualization art. The article includes a dozen or so software artists known for their visualizations made through "data-crunching" techniques. Unfortunately, the title "Frame That Spam!" is a total __ERROR__ as very little of the data which these artists are using is actually spam. Census data is not spam. Webpage data, military data, music data, photograph color data, sheep drawing data - this data is not spam data. THIS IS NOT SPAM ART. Regardless, the images from these artists are visually luscious, and the software code required to generate such images must be complex and beautiful. This wired article reflects that the trend in generative art during past decade or so has been to maximize the eye-candy factor. Using visual richness as a way to show off one's coding chops. This is what I call software materialism. I personally have been avoiding this direction with my own art and try to go a step farther, because I just don't see the point in maximizing the usage of machines to create retinal entertainment. Yet I am glad that these generative artists do what they do, because I love to see the wide variety of images which are possible only through software generation techniques.

Much of the art here on my blog is indeed REAL spam art. No only does it often use spam as source input, but my generated art is so wonderfully spammy that even the output is spam. Lately I've stopped generating images and instead generate gratuitous text/html, such that when the generated spam art is posted to this blog, it is in a form which is indexable by google and thus again becomes spam by tricking web surfers into finding it. (images are not search indexable) My method is Internet 'street style', because I liken it to graffiti art which also hacks public spaces to obtain viewers.