Difference between revisions of "Electric Sheep"
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==About:== | ==About:== | ||
Electric Sheep is a platform for digital artists to share their work. Although people may be familiar with digital art in the print form, Electric Sheep takes digital print artwork and turns them into "sheep": abstract animations from the artwork that is submitted. | Electric Sheep is a platform for digital artists to share their work. Although people may be familiar with digital art in the print form, Electric Sheep takes digital print artwork and turns them into "sheep": abstract animations from the artwork that is submitted. | ||
Revision as of 21:09, 18 October 2012
Contents
About:
Electric Sheep is a platform for digital artists to share their work. Although people may be familiar with digital art in the print form, Electric Sheep takes digital print artwork and turns them into "sheep": abstract animations from the artwork that is submitted.
Founded in 1999 by software artistScott Draves, Draves describes his "sheep" as artificial life. In his portfolio, Draves starts off this description as "...it is software that recreates the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction though mathematics. The system is made up of man and machine, a cyborg mind with 450,000 participant computers and people all over the Internet." How all the animations are created is through the "Flame Algorithm", which Draves created in 1992. This algorithm is what takes the still images and creates them into animations or "flames".
Users and Producers
Not only does Draves incorporate open collaboration to making Electric Sheep, he also offers this collaboration to its users. Users can "vote" for their favorite sheep and based on these results, the most popular sheep get mated together to make new sheep. On the electric sheep website, it is possible for users to see the "lineage" and "family tree" of the sheep and where they were created from. Users can also see which sheeps received the highest votes and thus were mated together. It is also encouraged to partake in the "shepherding" process as an opportunity to "make your own sheep" is also presented on the website.
Ethical Topics of Discussion:
Open Source
With open source code, which is what Electric Sheep is operated on, Electric Sheep has been able to benefit from collection of sources since with open source programs, people are free to add and contribute to the project. The program is also free and downloadable on Mac and PC which aligns with the open source attitude. However, this ethical questions that are raised are what code is decided to be kept and not kept when people collaborate. Or if someone writes a really critical portion of the code, other than the people that work at Electric Sheep or Scott Draves, that person may deserve more credibility, especially with Electric Sheep's Reusing and Remixing Policy.
- Reusing and Remixing
The reusing and remixing policy allows for the users of Electric Sheep to safely accredit the usage of either screensavers/artwork/etc... This may become a problem because even though the user by accredit the artwork correctly, the artists of the artwork that Electric Sheep uses may be not agree with what their artwork is being used for. This is something to consider since Electric Sheep is an open source program, it is completely run by the people that contribute to it.
The process of voting for Sheeps you like and don't like
The voting process is a way for users to pick and choose which sheeps they like and don't like. The sheeps that get more votes are ranked as the "best sheeps" and the best sheeps are mated together to create new ones. However, the process of voting is not as widespread of a concept especially since the way to up-vote and down-vote are just "up" and "down" arrow keys on a computer. In his porfolio, Draves says, " viewers all over the Internet judge the art on the fly soon after it is generated by their computers." However, viewers may not know that they are actually judging a sheep. They may think that they are just skipping a sheep and going onto the next sheep.
This could be a major flaw in the voting system since then sheeps would get undeserved up votes and down-votes and would not accomplish the collaborative nature of generating sheeps.
Creative Commons license
- Crediting usage of Sheeps (Draves & "Electric Sheep)
[The Creative Commons License]that Electric Sheep abides by brings up ethical questioning along the topics of intent and responsibility. Are the ways sheeps are used and generated reflected upon the user/Scott Draves/Electric Sheep/ or the algorithm?
