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Painting by numbers is pretty nonsense

A promotional event for an online security specialist is hardly an occasion that springs to mind as likely to provoke a discussion about the nature and meaning of Art. But one last week staged by MessageLabs actually took the form of an art exhibition, called Infected Art, Bringing Cyber Threats to Life.

You are reading the words of a man whose bullshit detector flashes red alert every time he goes into a modern art gallery. I have nothing against visual artists. They brighten the place up. They produce beautiful things.

 
It's when they talk about what they are doing that I have problems: so often they spout what sounds to me like codswallop, or cite meanings so trite as to be hardly worth expressing.

 
The MessageLabs exhibition has some striking images by "computational artist" Alex Dragulescu, apparently derived from the malware code supplied by the company. A sort of painting by numbers, in fact.

 
Dragulescu was not there to explain himself but it seems the pictures derived at least in part from different squiggles being assigned to different machine-code operations.

 
"They're pretty nonsense," I said to the Messages Labs men showing me round. They looked hurt.

 
"They might be useful," suggested one, arguing that the pictures might help researchers spot viruses, or understand them better. Even he did not sound convinced.

 
The pictures, like the one above 'depicting' the Netsky email worm, will certainly be useful as a bit of fun to brighten up dull screeds on the latest web  threats. They are faintly reminiscent of pictures of real micro-organisms, but nothing like as interesting.

 
It's like those concoctions of metal you see in galleries supposedly reflecting aspects of the machine age. None of them so wondrous as the real thing: a viaduct, a steam train, a dam, an oil platform, or the workings of a mechanical watch.

Posted by Clive Akass on March 12, 2008 | Permalink

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Comments

I actually saw an ad for Message Labs in the Economist using one of these images. It caught the eye, so from a marketing perspective maybe not such a bad move?

Posted by: economist reader | 17 Mar 2008 11:14:40

Absolutely. There will be a picture in our next edition too

Posted by: Clive Akass | 18 Mar 2008 11:52:14

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