Scott Draves sez, “The Electric Sheep makes art
collaboratively with 60,000 computers and people all over the
internet. It’s based on a free screensaver that anyone can download
and run. As it runs you may vote on designs you like, and the
favorites survive to reproduce with a family resemblance, hence the
flock evolves to please its human audience. It also supports
Intelligent Design: you can use a genetic editor to create your own
sheep and upload them into the gene-pool. All the sheep are CC
licensed and may be remixed or remade into your own work.
I use the free screensaver as a design laboratory and supercomputer to
realize higher quality works such as all-over print t-shirts, limited
edition c-prints, and
high-resolution videos (like the one recently commissioned
for the new Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University, and the sample from
our Blu Ray). Our
objective is to make this artificial life-form self-sustaining, so the
revenue generated by these pieces funds the operation of and
improvements to the open source screensaver.
For example, In the past 6 months the Electric Sheep have been totally
remade. We have a new server (including support from archive.org) and
the client has been rewritten. The whole setup is 10x better than it
used to be: the visual/genetic language is more expressive, the sheep
have double the resolution and a better codec (x264), display is
totally smooth, and download works for everyone.
More information can be found on the Wikipedia and
in my bio.
High Fidelity Demo Excerpt (2009)
(Thanks, Scott!)