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Michael Berger Gallery Show

The Michael Berger Gallery on the Southside of Pittsburgh has us in a two-person show with Cheonae Kim until April 3rd. They wrote the following:

SCOTT DRAVES has turned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University to a fine arts exploration of the relationship between man and machine. His work investigates the ways in which technology and digital creations are capable of sustainably and accurately representing our experience of the world today. Moreover, he is interested in the ways that the philosophies of science and open-source can be applied to art. He has said, “I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force.”

The works on display all stem from of an original idea which Draves named, “The Electric Sheep Project.” For this project, Draves created software that runs an internet-distributed “supercomputer” program, which anyone can download and run. All participants work together determine the formation and movement of different series of images, through open source, crowd source, and voting. The moving images are referred to as “sheep.” Sheep that gain votes through this software then reproduce according to a genetic algorithm. As the network focuses more attention onto the “sheep,” they became higher resolution and more complex. Draves says, “This mirrors the process by which the more attention you give an idea, the more detail and structure appears.”

The exhibition includes a selection of different “sheep” that Draves has chosen and edited from his software system’s results, each of which have become of personal significance to him. These high-resolution videos feature incredibly detailed evolving artificial forms of life.

Posted by spot at March 5, 2010 09:52 AM