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Art met computer security on Monday night in San Francisco's trendy -- and techy -- South of Market district. On the eve of the RSA Conference, the Varnish gallery unveiled an exhibit called "Infected Art." It's a collection of images created from the code of various viruses, worms, spam, and other malware. An algorithm was designed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts based computer artist who analyzed the patterns in code and represented them digitally.

Alex Dragulescu
Artist
MessageLabs provided me with data files of computer viruses and other internet malwares and I created the computer program that looks for patterns and ribbons in these data files and takes those attributes and connects them to an algorithm that grows these 3D creates.

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So you might call Alex's art medium, computer code. He's not creating this art with a brush and canvas, in fact after he writes the code, the computer does the rest.

Alex Dragulescu
Artist
What's really interesting about the process and this project was that I never really had any manual intervention on these shapes. My interventions were through computer code and how I mapped the data to the algorithm. So in a way my technique is very experimental, it takes a lot of iterations and sometimes I'm very surprised at what I find in the morning when the computer runs at night and sort of parses the data and transforms these into 3D images.

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The works were commissioned by security vendor MessageLabs, which came up with the idea about six months ago to give the public a visual image of what the company makes its business fighting. The mounted works at Varnish aren't for sale, but MessageLabs will use the images on posters and ads.

Maksym Schipka
Senior Architect, MessageLabs
So this image represents Natsky one of the top viruses now a days, one of the top email worms. Natsky was discovered quite a long time ago, on the 21st of March 2004 and yet nowadays it still tops as the first email, mass mailing worm out there. So Natsky as you can see has a number of these curly tentacles-at least on the image. The next image is quite interesting because it's the same Natsky just infected with a file infector virus called Perite

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When MessageLabs sent Alex the data, he wasn't worried, because uncompiled versions of the code were used so there was no danger of infection. Though, one time, he couldn't find one of the files, so he used his antivirus software to track it down on his computer.

For the IDG News Service, I'm Nick Barber in Boston with reporting by Stephen Lawson in San Francisco.