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Flames used by Imaginary Foundation

The Imaginary Foundation makes excellent shirts and giclee prints with Magritte-esque Victorian/SciFi designs, many of which are based on Flame images made with my algorithm. Great work, I can't wait to get one! When I released the code as Open Source I hoped others would make all kinds of stuff with it. This is one example.

About six of the 50 or so images use flames, including: no limits, cosmic escalator, albert, watering can.

Old Flames at NASA on TV

My fine old friend Tom Lawrence sent me this still from a TV documentary where a computer at JPL is on-screen and you can see the old flame screensaver running. This isn't the Electric Sheep, but the old version the one that got included as part of xscreensaver and hence a standard part of linux for many years. It ran like an ordinary screensaver, not using distributed computation or Darwinian evolution, and it wasn't really animated (it just accumlated a bunch of random flames over time). So the quality was way lower than the Electric Sheep, but it did have the idea of iterated nonlinear functions, which the sheep still use. Jwz has the date as 1993 and that's probably when it went into xscreensaver, but that version was based on previous ones that ran on Sun workstations and wrote directly into the framebuffer. This code goes back to around 1988 when I was working in the graphics group at Brown University, which is when Tom and I met.

The Firebird, FeXIV, and Star Oasis

Two newly released Electric Sheep music videos on the Archive: The Firebird (music by Kenji Williams) and FeXIV (Iron Fourteen, music by Per Bloland commissioned by Michael Straus). Plus Star Oasis (music by Alex Theory) rereleased for easy download (it was only available by bittorrent before and the tracker shut down a long time ago).

First Free 1080p Electric Sheep

Here's a 4:30 sample high quality quicktime from my Blu Ray. It's a 2GB download from Archive and you'll need a fast computer to watch it without stuttering but the results are well worth it. Big screen recommended.

Generally my HD work is limited edition only, but this sample is CC licensed and freely redistributable. Spread the word!

Fr0st released

Fr0st is a new genetic editor for Electric Sheep and Flames in general. See the blog for documentation, and the download page. It's GPL licensed and runs on Linux and Windows and with some tweaking should work on Mac too since it's based on FLAM3, wxWidgets, and Python.

Compared to the Apophysis, it is still quite young, but crucially it was developed with Open Source tools (instead of Delphi) so that anyone can join into the development. This makes me very optimistic about its future.

Many thanks to Vitor Bosshard the lead developer.

Headed to Miami

Headed to Miami tomorrow early AM to show Dreams in High Fidelity. Thank you Garrison!

Newspaper Story about the Art in the Gates Center

The Tribune-Review published a story reviewing the art in the new Gates center.

It's nice to see a journalist get it, as when she asks: "are the computers working as tools in the creation of the art or as co-creators of the art?"

Previously: the press release, and some photos.