Electric Sheep artificial life DVD launch March 31, San Francisco

Cory Doctorow 10:29 am Thu Mar 18, 2004

Spot Draves is the author of the brilliant Electric Sheep screensaver — this is a distributed rendering application that grabs its users' computers' idle cycles to create computationally expensive, vivid and beautiful animated fractals. Users vote for the animations they like best while the screensaver is running, and those fractals are then given precedence within the computational gene pool, spawning variations that are rendered out again, dancing for their human masters who have the power of life and death over them.

The result is a breathtaking, psychedelic form of artificial life whose fitness factor is the ability to tickle the aesthetics of computer geeks.

Spot has assembled the best of these animations — these "Electric Sheep" — on a DVD, with DJ mixed background audio. The contents of the DVD are all online as small QuickTime movies, for for the high-rez, you'll have to order a copy or go to the launch on March 31, in San Francisco:

wednesday march 31st 7pm-2am StudioZ
314 11th st @ folsom san francisco
415.252.7666 www.studioz.tv 21+ w/ID
free admission

featuring the soundz of Spool, jhno, mbb,
dj vordo, and Kenji Williams/ABA Structure

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