January 8, 2007
Posted by xavier watson
do electric sheep dream in the chapel of sacred mirrors?
Scott “Spot” Draves, designer of the electricsheep screen saver, will be joining Alex Grey at his CoSM for a talk at the upcoming Entheocentric Salon. Scott will be introducing his favorite project, Dreams in High Fidelity: a painting in continuous evolution, and exhibiting electricsheep to the visionary art community here in New York for the first time.
Electricsheep is (or are),
…the collective dream of sleeping computers… A distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms… The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep… Popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience.
Dreams in High Fidelity represents the best output electricsheep has to offer, rendered triply-well, requiring 20x the computing power of the desktop software. The artist, in this case Scott himself, selects his favorite sheep from the archives and public flock, and sends them back to be re-rendered at high fidelity. Physically it consists of a small computer driving a large high definition display.
The idea behind Dreams is that
These premium editions…have a symbiotic relationship to the free screen-saver. The free version provides the design laboratory and gene pool from which the best sheep are extracted. It also provides the distributed supercomputer needed to realize the high fidelity content. To compliment, the premium editions provide the financing required to keep the whole project in operation, and develop it further.
Musically speaking, 28thday and Psybooty will be using the occasion to host their first release party. They are celebrating the launch of Current of Life, by the Boston psytrance artists known together as M-field. Joining them from our community in sound will be D-space, Coral, Dan Covan, and Pedro.
Psylab, also of Boston, is also on the lineup. We first heard Psylab play at an renegade beach party this summer past. They play a musical fusion of live instrumentation and psychedelic dance music that captures the magic of the latter with the artistic appeal of the former. Their name has been appearing on event lineups across the region ever since; these guys are dedicated to their craft.
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”>The monthly entheocentric event at CoSM brings the urbane spirit of the salon to New York in the 21st century, with a mix of intellectual exhibitions, neo-tribal dance, live artistic performances, psychotropic projections, and visionary conversations.
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5 Comments
January 9, 2007
That was incredible. An amazing piece of artwork.
January 9, 2007
Electric sheep DVD order info?
January 9, 2007
[quote comment="205"]Electric sheep DVD order info?[/quote]
You can always just download the screen saver and watch it for free every day…
…but there is a DVD for sale at
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/scottdraves
April 18, 2007
Thank You
June 14, 2007
This one makes sense “One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”
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