Looking Outward 06 / Electric Sheep

This is probably one of the more obvious examples of randomness in digital art, but I still find the overall concept really interesting.
Electric Sheep (a project founded by Scott Draves) is a collaborative and dynamic body of abstract work that can be downloaded to most devices. The program runs while devices are in “sleep” mode, communicating via the internet with other devices around the world to create and change the animations (or “sheep”) on display. Users can vote for their favorite ‘sheep’ with their keyboard, which generates new sheep via the algorithm. Sheep can also be “mated together” manually by server administrators or by users who download existing parameters and make changes.

The reason I chose this work for the blog this week is because of its focus on interactivity. The fact that this is a collaborative project between thousands of different computers is fascinating. And while there is an underlying element of randomness with the automatic ‘mating’ of sheep through the algorithm, users can also participate in generating/supplying new sheep to the flock.