Intersections - Nguyen Dang Binh

Scott Draves
Dreams in High Fidelity
24 inches x 42 inches
Distributed screensaver, aesthetic evolution, custom software
ARTIST STATEMENT
Dreams in High Fidelity is a painting that evolves. It was designed and
rendered with a cyborg mind composed of 30,000 computers and
people mediated by a genetic algorithm.
Physically it consists of a small computer driving a large high-definition
display. The computer creates a continuously morphing, non-repeating,
abstract animation.
The animations are realized with the Electric Sheep, a distributed screensaver
that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose
of animating and evolving artificial life-forms, each known as a “sheep.”
The voting of the audience determines the fitness function: the most
popular sheep live longer and reproduce.
Interested users can download additional software and become sheep
designers. They manually edit genomes and post them to the server
where they join the flock. Hence the artificial intelligence of the
server collaborates and competes with a human design collective.
Starting in 2005, the artist began to use the Electric Sheep as raw material
for creation of Dreams in High Fidelity. He selects his favorite sheep
from the archives and public flock and sends them back to be re-rendered
at high fidelity: heaven for an electric sheep.
Electronic Art and Animation Catalog Art Gallery Artworks
CONTACT
Scott Draves
SPOTWORKS
142 Taylor Street
San Francisco, California 94102 USA
siggraph@draves.org
www.hifidreams.com
COLLABORATORS
The Electric Sheep
Dreams in High Fidelity is available in a limited edition of four. Each has
a slightly different flock and includes a sheep unique to it. Each flock
resonates differently on playback so its sheep have a unique frequency
distribution.
TECHNICAl STATEMENT
The genetic code of a sheep is about 240 floating-point numbers long.
It is rendered into an image by the Fractal Flame algorithm, a generalized
and refined type of iterated function system. Despite appearances, the
implementation is strictly two-dimensional.
There are about 55GB of 1280x720 mpeg4 video stored on the hard disk
of the playback computer. The content is stored in a directory of 1,000
clips, each 30 seconds long. The clips are arranged in a graph, with
each clip having multiple successors (five on average). They are woven
into a seamless, non-repeating sequence in real time.
Each frame of video takes about one CPU-hour to render. The whole
Dreams in High Fidelity would have required over 100 years of work on
an ordinary PC.