By Ryan Singel, Wired

Most people want to avoid spam and viruses, which is exactly why MIT Media Lab's grad student Alex Dragulescu spins the net's detritus into art.

E-mail security company MessageLabs commissioned Dragulescu to visualize the threats the company finds in the 3 million messages it scans daily. Dragulescu used algorithms to find recurring patterns in the source code of viruses and Trojans and then fed the results into a visualization algorithm.

The only manipulation involved was color-coding, setting the virtual position of the camera, and some lighting effects. The project lives somewhere between pure art and information visualization, Dargulescu says.