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Electric Sheep
Monday September 27 2004 — 5:15 PM
For more info, visit:
www.electricsheep.org
Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life forms. The project is an attention vortex. It illustrates the process by which the longer and closer one studies something, the more detail and structure appears.
When the software is activated, the screen goes black, and an animated "sheep" appears. In parallel, the screen-saver client connects to to a P2P network and joins the distributed computation of new sheep. The screen saver is a window into a visual space shared among all users. Each sheep is about four seconds long and is the phenotype of an artificial organism, an "electric sheep". The animations loop and dovetail with each other, forming a random graph. The client displays them one after another in a continuous, ever-changing sequence. The fitness function for their evolution is determined by the collective voting of the thousands of users.
Not only is the rendering shared, but so is the bandwidth load of distributing the animations. The gnutella P2P hetwork is used for both the heavy lifting of MPEG sharing and for calculating the aesthetic selection function.
Electric Sheep investigates the role of experiencers in creating the experience. If nobody ran the client, there would be nothing to see. The sheep system exhibits increasing returns on each of its levels. As more clients join, more computationl muscle becomes available and the resolution of the graphics may be increase by making the sheep longer, larger, or sharper. The more people participate, the better the graphics look. Likewise as developers focus more of their attention on the source code, the client and server themselves become more efficient, grow new features, and are ported into new habitats. The project gains momentum and attracts more developers. And as more users vote for their favorite sheep, the evolutionary algorithm more quickly distills randomnes into eye candy.
"I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force. The proliferation of powerful computers with high bandwidth network connections forms the substrate of an expanding universe. The electric sheep and we, their shepherds, are colonizing this new frontier."
BIO
Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a visualist and programmer residing in San Francisco. He is the creator of the Fractal Flame algorithm, the Bomb visual-musical instrument, and the Electric Sheep distributed screen-saver. All of Draves' software artworks are released as open source and distributed for free on the internet. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. In 1997 Spot received a PhD in Computer Science from
Carnegie Mellon University for a thesis on metaprogramming for media processing. Today he regularly projects live video for underground parties and at clubs, and he just released SPOTWORKS, a DVD of abstract animation synchronized with music.
www.draves.org
www.spotworks.com
© 2005 · Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH · info@siggraph.ca
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