Spam Plants - Click to enlargeOne of the most innovative and creative artists working today is Alex Dragulescu, a Romanian "visual" artist who heads the Experimental Game Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at University of California, San Diego.
His images are absolutely fascinating. Some of them are beautiful and organic-looking, while others appear to be views of some alien architecture.
But it's not the images that are interesting so much as the process. Dragulescu uses spam to generate some of his images. He does this by using words in spam mailings to trigger different structures to be digitally rendered. The image at the top of this post comes from his Spam Plants series.
Dragulescu definitely pushes the art/mathematics interface to an extreme, with the random detritus of life thrown in for good measure. He describes his projects as "experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets."
It's impossible to describe Dragulescu's work without seeing the images, so check his website for much more.
Be sure to investigate some of the other work being created at the Experimental Game Lab , where "somewhere between media art, scientific visualization and computer gaming a new territory of expression is emerging." Sheldon Brown's Scaleable City project is one such project.
It is hard to imagine how amazing it must be to teach or go to school at a university like UCSD, where anything short of the absolute limits of creativity is viewed as abject failure.