2004-02-12

Electric Sheep
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4605


Most of this is going to be a video documentary he recorded on his own. In the
dark.

http://www.electricsheep.org

[the guy doing this presentation:
http://draves.org/
and it looks like there's some really cool stuff there.]

He's plugging a DVD that contains this documentary and loads of abstract
imagery. Coming out in a couple of weeks. [Sounds cool.]

Distributed computers into a render farm.

Attention vortex. Illustrates the principle that the longer you look at
something, the more detail and complexity appears.

A sheep is an animated fractal flame, a generated mpeg. They're derived from the
current population of animations, with genetic mutation.

Users can vote for sheep which makes them more likely to reproduce.

The shape between the sheep is continuous, and the transition between sheep is
continuous because the client interpolates between animations. The sheep is a
string of real numbers, so it's possible to transform between them, each sheep
is a loop.

Investigates the effect of the experiencers on the experience.

If nobody ran the client, there would be no sheep.

Like the universe: irregularities, points in the universe become accretion
centres.

The more clients, the sharper, larger and better the sheep are.

Attentions acts on information the same way gravity acts on mass.

This protocol could support multiple alternative renderers.

[*whoa*]

Wicked slide: "Lies I Have Told You"

clients now run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

there are 350 simultaneous users.

The guy who ported it to Windows ported the entire app so he could see the
animations, without even seeing one.

During Summer 2003 the graphics got way better. Longer genetic code.

Symmetries: rotational and dihedral. Symmetry is rare in nature until life.

C^1 continuity. "Eliminates corners in motion". There are discontinuities in the
motion, or at least there used to be, in the transitions, which is what you want
for music, but you don't want it for the screen-saver. So they've got a change
which removes the discontinuities in the derivative of the motion.


* Inspiration

Karl Sims
- Aesthetic evolution on the Connection Machine. The more people stand infront
of a piece of art, the more the next piece of art will be based on that. Not
animated

International Genetic Art (John Mount)
- Internet base
- Not animated, not fractal

Artmatic (Eric Wenger)
- http://www.artmatic.com - not internet, not animated

Sims was a genius, nobody has manage to replicate his work. Wenger is almost
there though, also beautiful pictures.

IMP.org (Internet Movie Project)
- internet distributed rendering of movies.
- but not evolving