Electric Sheep
If I remember correctly, I was in 5th grade when Jurassic Park came out. I was big into dinosaurs at the time (I know, really original), and the movie only strengthened my obsession. I saw the movie over ten times in theaters alone, including a special showing with local paleontologist Robert Bakker who, along with being adjunct curator of the Tate Geological Museum a couple blocks from my house, was the chief dino consultant for Jurassic Park. I read his book, along with Michael Crichton’s, several times over the next two years.
So how did this lead me to discover a really interesting screensaver?
Well my friend Tim and I recently watched all 3 movies again (I forgot how bad the sequels were…), and it had been so long since I had seen the movie or read the book that details from both were mixed up in my head. I kept expecting things to happen that were in the book, and vice versa. One of the things I forgot was completely dropped from the movie was fractals and their relation to Dr. Ian Malcolm’s “chaos theory”. The book had sparked a mild and short-lived interest in fractals when I was younger, and strangely, I was reminded of them through their absence in the movie. Tonight, bored, I was searching Freshmeat for fractal generators when I came across the Electric Sheep screensaver project. As totally awesome as XP’s built-in screensavers are (including all those artifacts that have somehow survived since Windows 3.1…), I’m a fan of beautifully rendered, algorithmically generated screensavers. Mac OS X has some incredible OpenGL screensavers, but apparently Windows users prefer virtual aquariums. That void until now has been filled by Really Slick Screensavers, a collection of free, OpenGL-based, abstract screensavers. (If you’re curious, my favorite is Helios.) That void is now filled by Electric Sheep.
Electric Sheep is a distributed screensaver, which works much like the SETI@home and folding@home distributed processing projects. The point of this distributed network, however, is to render single frames of “flame fractal” animations called “sheep” which are uploaded to a server, and compressed into MPEG2 movies, which you view locally as your screensaver. These sheep are constantly literally evolving and even “interbreeding”. The name “Electric Sheep” is a reference to the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a novel I have absolutely no desire to read, as it was turned into one of the most violently boring movies I’ve ever seen. The basic metaphor is that as your computer “sleeps”, it communicates with computers all over the world running the Electric Sheep client to construct these highly complex digital “dreams”. That’s…about as good as I can explain it. For further information, I highly recommend checking out the Electric Sheep tour, which has, among other things, a video “documentary” that does its best to explain the concept, while you get to watch high res video of some fractal sheep. There is also an FAQ on the main site, as well as an interpretation page, which put it all together best for me.
What is so interesting about the Electric Sheep project however, is more than its hypnotic rendered animations; users can actually create their own sheep algorithms through Apophysis, a program for formulating your own sheep to upload to the server. If you see a sheep you like while it is running, the client also features a voting system: if you like the sheep currently playing on your system, you press the up arrow; if not, down. This information is sent to the server and aids in the evolutionary process of the “flock”. Less popular sheep are weeded out and eventually erased from the server without a trace. The more popular continue to evolve to new complexities, and even interbreed to create new digital dreams. On the Electric Sheep website, you can view family trees, each sheep’s relation to the rest of the flock, and lists of which frames were rendered by which users. It’s all a very strange and surreal community of sorts, and the program itself has already given my computer, in my mind, a bizarre, abstract…personality, for lack of a better word. I have already modified my power settings to make my screensaver come on after a shorter period of non-use, and my monitor to stay on longer before powering down, so I can watch my computer “dream” before I fall asleep as well.
I’m totally in love with this project, and I can’t really explain why. There’s a certain intriguing, almost cyber-punk quality to it that I think would be lost on your average computer user. I’m not sure how much I want to discuss screensaver semantics with my grandma, for example. Geeks only.
September 29th, 2005 at 5:17 am
Besides you being a bitch for not telling me I was able to vote for my sheep I’m absolutely twitterpated. There’s one with a bit of a radial swirl of bright colors, mainly a blue, green, and red (orange-red, almost) that I absolutely love that I’d vote for over and over.
Anyhow, while I haven’t used a screensaver in years (well, except for ‘Blank Screen’, if that counts) I now have one that starts every three minutes and my monitor now doesn’t shut off for three hours so I can help the project.
I find myself staring at it during DVD Audio Commentaries.
October 30th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Man, the Philip K Dick novel is AMAZING. I saw the screensaver project awhile back and passed it up, since I rarely use them. But this sounds very interesting.