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!)