Spam Architecture

Whether it's an offer for cheap Viagra or the pleading of a wealthy prince in desperate need of your bank account number, heaps of electronic spam fill our e-mail trash bins. It is a never ending assault. But it is also the material out of which Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu creates his architectural models.

Rather than discarding the spam that clogs our e-mail filters, Dargulescu recycles this information detritus as the input for a piece of software he wrote which interprets the words of the spammers into 3-dimensional forms. The complex jagged forms of "Spam Architecture" are sculptures about architecture, rather than models of proposed buildings. There is no sense of function or interiority, but the external forms pack a provocative aesthetic wallop.

The complex algorithm Dragulescu wrote could have generated buildings with organic curvilinear forms or splattered with bright colors, or almost anything, but he chose a specific vocabulary of sharp corners and hard folded planes.

There are two ways of interpreting "Spam Architecture". On the one hand, Dragulescu has translated electronic spam into a series of aggressive angular buildings that reflect the aggresive nature of spam. In this way, the 'buildings' are true to the inherent qualites of their material. On the other hand, the works of "Spam Architecture" also suggest a well-armed fortress bristling with spiked weaponry, set to keep the invading hordes of electronic spam at bay. In this way the work reflects our anger at the growing nuisance of spam. Both interpretations are equally valid, which makes "Spam Architecture" a particularly complex and compelling sculptural project.