spot blog

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a nice story in last Sunday's paper, triggered by my talk there for the installation of their second acquisition of my work.

My favorite part is the description of the work itself as "made of rose, silver and gold with a shimmering, ethereal quality; a glowing sun in the night sky, pierced with bright strands of spiraling lightning bolts; and autumn-colored mosaic tile melting on the floor of a mosque, followed by a pattern reminiscent of a raindrop spreading on the greenish surface of a deep, still pool."

PBS Documentary on Generative Art

PBS Arts' "Off Book" series covered generative art by interviewing Will Wright, Luke Dubois, and me. The sunglasses shot makes me blush.

The Firebird showing at Korean Film Festival

I originally made The Firebird for fulldome projection at 2400x2400 resolution. It won a couple of awards at the Domefest film festival in 2007 at the LodeStar planetarium in Albuquerque. It has since shown at the Redcat Disney/Calarts Theater, Los Angeles, and The Great Wall of Oakland.

November 17-23 it will be part of the OFF and Free Film Festival in Seoul Korea. I can't read the program so I don't have any more details but if you are in a position to go, maybe you can. If you do, please let me know how it went. I can see the images and it looks like there's a bunch of cool stuff, especially works by Max Hattler. Thanks to the organizers for the invitation.

credits: Direction and Video by Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep, Music by Kenji Williams, Sitar by Mark Deutsch. In a turn-about compared to the usual process of making "visual music", Scott produced the animation first, and then Kenji scored the music to follow, like a movie soundtrack.

synopsis: The Electric Sheep is a cyborg mind. It harnesses the collective intelligence of 450,000 computers and people ti create abstract art with mathematics and Darwinian evolution. The result is seamless, organic, and infinite. "The Firebird" is an homage to Stravinky's ballet, but now light and artificial life dance with humanity. Our universe started with a fiery explosion -- the big bang -- and through the acceleration of technology we are headed into another singularity, and headed for our rebirth.

Celeste Finalist

I was a finalist for the Celeste Prize, one of 50 selected from thousands of entries for a show at the Invisible Dog Art Center and competing for a 6000 euro prize!

fr0st packaged for gentoo

Thanks to Samuli Suominen, Fr0st is now packaged for Gentoo Linux: http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/media-gfx/fr0st
http://packages.gentoo.org/package/media-gfx/fr0st

Recent Press: Creators Project and Singularity Hub

The Creators Project ran an interview of me where I talked about what tools and software I use.

And the Singularity Hub has a nice writeup on the Electric Sheep. I really appreciate the research that Peter Murray did for his story. He did his homework and put together his own narrative. He concludes:

And then [Draves] starts to get metaphysical for real.

“…is humanity the only possible vehicle for what really amounts to a soul? …some people believe that all material matter follows the rules of physics, and if you can figure out what physics is, a computer can follow the rules and therefore you can simulate life in a computer. So it really becomes a profound question that we are, as a society, really just starting to struggle with.”

Right now, the Electric Sheep are still just screensavers, albeit evolving and unpredictable screensavers. But what limits are there to the kind of reiterative, informatics cross-breeding underlying their generation? What might be produced when the same process is applied to more functional outputs? What if we woke up one morning and our computers were doing things that we didn’t fully understand.

And so on.

How that might play out is as unpredictable as the sheep. Until it happens, I suppose we’re left merely to wonder…and perhaps dream.