The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity - 1:00:36 - Sep 15, 2006 - Videos

Google Tech Talks September 14, 2006 Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a software artist residing in San Francisco. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. ABSTRACT Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms known as sheep. The votes of the users form the basis for the fitness function for a genetic algorithm on a space of abstract animations. Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool. This cyborg mind composed of 35,000 computers and people was used to make Dreams in High Fidelity: a painting that evolves. It consists of 55GB of high definition sheep that would have taken one computer over 100 years to render, played back to form a nonrepeating continuously morphing image. The talk will cover the genetic code and renderer, the genetic algorithm, how error correction is built into the distributed renderer while minimizing performance penalty, and how to distribute 750GB of video per day without paying for it. The talk will include a demo of the artwork. http://draves.org/portfolio/

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