Scott Draves: Pioneer of Generative Art
May 13th – June 5th, 2011
Opening: Friday, May 13, 7pm – 10pm.
What is the relationship between man and machine? Is open source a sustainable way to run a creative society? Can digital creations have the subtlety we know in the natural world? These are the issues addressed by Scott Draves work; he creates art by writing software that runs an internet distributed supercomputer consisting of 450,000 computers and people, creating images as a form of artificial life, each with its own genome, generated by thousands of numbers that define how it looks and moves. The first versions of this algorithm date from 1992.
Draves created a new collective intelligence–the Electric Sheep–in 1999; it has been evolving and developing since. The system is based on a open source screensaver that anyone can download and run. All the computers work together to render the animations, or "sheep" (it takes an hour to render each frame, or one day of work per second or animation). People contribute their creativity and aesthetics, via open source, crowd source, and by voting. Sheep with favorable votes mate with each other and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm. Hence the flock evolves to satisfy its human audience. This popular open source version makes designs that are the basis for his fine art.
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