spot blog

Stills from Generation 243

Stills and title page from "Generation 243" by Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep, commissioned by the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and installed in the new Gates Center. See the press release.

Art in Odd Places Pictures

Pictures of Lost Sheep in the Art in Odd Places show which just ended. Thank you to Hot Blondies Bakery, DubSpot DJ school and cafe, and Design Within Reach for hosting us.

Unified Love Movement

My friend Garrison Buxton and his wife Alison have an installation Unified Love Movement at Mainsite Gallery in Norman Oklahoma that includes the Electric Sheep. Read their page about the piece on the Ad Hoc Art site, see some pictures, or read the press coverage including a mention of me.

Singularity Summit 2009

Last weekend I was at the Singularity Summit showing off the latest high fidelity Electric Sheep and was interviewed for a documentary by TransAlchemy, see their teaser on YouTube.

The Summit was full of interesting people and the presentations were very high quality. Thanks Michael & Aruna!

Flammarion

"A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched..."

So reads the caption of this famous anonymous engraving, called the Flammarion because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion's 1888 book L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire.

Who has felt like this, glimpsing the Merkabah? Plus, it sounds like "Flame Algorithm".

This version was colored with crayon and is Copyright Roberta Weir 1970.

Final Paper: Aesthetics of the Electric Sheep

I just realized I never posted the final version of this paper I wrote with Ralph Abraham and friends. The Aesthetics and Fractal Dimension of Electric Sheep, 2006
with Scott Draves, Pablo Viotti, Fred Abraham, and Clint Sprott Int'l. J. Bifurcations and Chaos, v.18, n.4, April 2008
Subjects: Art, Fractal geometry
Written: June 2, 2006

Abstract: Physicist Julien Clinton Sprott demonstrated a correlation between aesthetic judgments of fractal images and their fractal dimensions. Scott 'Spot' Draves, a computer scientist and artist, has created a multidimensional space of colored fractal images (called flames), generated from two-dimensional iterated function systems, and an algorithm that expands them into brief animations (called electric sheep). His website, electricsheep.org, serves electric sheep as screen-savers to a large community of regular users, via the sheepserver, which is highly interactive. Both server and users generate new sheep. The users vote electronically for the sheep they like while the screen-saver is running. In this report we proceed from Sprott to Spot. Data from Spot's website show significant correlations between aesthetic judgments for sheep and their fractal dimension, similar to reports by colleagues of Sprott who use Sprott's chaotic attractors as images. Presently, we are studying the variation of this correlation over time, to determine if there are similarities or differences in the evolution of aesthetic preferences with respect to fractal dimension as Taylor has found in the evolution of Pollock's art.

[PDF] 20 pages with 6 figures, 6.7 MB

Google Chrome Artist Theme

Google Chrome has released 100 Artist themes, including designs by Casey Reas, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and me!