Electric sheep

by shrikant • 16 years ago

74 20 16 years ago

srean2• 16 years ago

If you like this, you should definitely checkout the gallery, the simple python source and all other beauties at Andrej Bauer's http://www.random-art.org/.

He has an interesting story of migrating from a ocaml + cduce implementation to one based on Django and javascript. The javascript source was generated by compiling the original Ocaml sources using Ocamljs. The newer version being based on javascript, one can run it in one's browser.

For the story: http://math.andrej.com/2010/08/17/random-art-and-the-law-of-...

joshu• 16 years ago

Both grad students at cmu SCS at the same time, too

kayoone• 16 years ago

This is pretty awesome! The site seems to be a bit overloaded though, direct link to youtube video with description: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz2pThxf3YU

Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

algorias• 16 years ago

For those interested in creating their own fractals, I've written a GUI editor in python for doing just that:

https://launchpad.net/fr0st

Fargren4• 16 years ago

I think the name misses the point Dick was making in the novel (and throughout a lot of his work). It's about what exactly makes us "human", and how maybe it's possible to create something find all the qualities that we believe define humanity outside of humans, thus taking value away from being humane, or maybe adding value to it. The question "Do androids dream with electric sheep?"is just an example of this. "Human is" is another excelent short story by Dick on the subject.

The fractals are very nice though =)

srean2• 16 years ago

Have never been more touched by any other science fiction movie. It lingered within my mind for days.

Fargren4• 16 years ago

The thing with Science Fiction is that it's hardly a genre. As Asimov shows in "The Caves of Steel", it's mor ofa set of conventions about setting and style that can be applied to basically any genre. So you have immensely varied works of sci-fi that have bassically no relation between one another. That leads to someone loving a work of science fiction, trying other science fiction looking for something similar, and fiding that there's nothing similar to what he liked in other works.

But if you are searching for something similar to Bladerunner, a TV series of the same vein and tone would be Ergo Proxy.

omaranto• 16 years ago

I always found the movie pretty boring, but it's based on a very good novel.

spot2• 16 years ago

I didn't name it "Electric Sheep" to comment on the meaning of PKDick's book (or the movie). I use that name because screen-savers come on when your computer goes to sleep.... and dreams.

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

I'd definitely be running this if I wasn't turning my screen off when I'm not using the computer, and if I didn't rather spend my CPU cycle on scientific/medical distributed computing projects (BOINC Rosetta@home, primarily).

pak• 16 years ago

In case you are thinking of running this, it is fantastically memory/disk space expensive. The fractals are rendered as movies and saved to your disk.

spot2• 16 years ago

Thanks, glad you all like it.

This open source network is the popular side of my art. For a peek at the good stuff, see http://picasaweb.google.com/scottdraves/Presskit02# including the recent projections at MoMA.

You can download a sample at 1080p: http://www.archive.org/details/HighFidelityDemo (control-click the quicktime link and save to your desktop, skip the embedded player).

Electric sheep

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