Electric Sheep
Contents
Electric Sheep
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 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 to merge submitted digital artwork together. This is what takes the still images and creates them into animations.
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
Creative Commons license
- Crediting usage of Sheeps (Draves & "Electric Sheep)
