Lately, I seem to be finding more and more sophisticated projects that transform computer data into art.

Alex Dragulescu’s project: malwarez, visualizes the dreaded computer virus as a 3-dimensional, living organism. The images in the collection were commisioned by internet security company, MessageLabs, and breathes life into viruses, trojans and spyware code.

From Alex Dragulescu’s site:

For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.

The featured images contain stunning renderings of internet nasties such as Stormy, MyDoom, Mytob, IRCBot and Netsky.

SOURCES:

[Gizmodo.com] World’s least favorite computer viruses as haunting 3d art.

[Alex Dragulescu] project: malewarez

[MessageLabs] Know Your Enemy

I was surfing today and came across the website of Leonardo Solaas. I have to say that I am quite impressed at how he uses interesting techniques of visualizing data to create artistic images. One of his nifty projects, Dreamlines, allows users to enter search terms and then the application uses Google’s image search. Pixels become data values which are then compiled to form a constantly changing and shifting image. I used the search term “surrealmuse” to create the images here in the post.

Another project, Migrations, takes two completely different sources and smashes their data together. The first source consists of random fragments of The Quixote, the second comes from randomly selected words from the world news of the day according to the BBC. The words from both sources tangle with one another to form an interesting visual set. Salaas says that “…letters migrate between them to show the simple fact that, in spite of all their distances, they are made of the same stuff. The foundations of our culture, the accounts of the world we live in: all is language.”

His site has quite a bit more fun applications and is definitely worth a visit.

[Leonardo Salaas]