Counting electric sheep

Just a short note–I’ve been using a new screensaver on my Macs and PCs lately and it’s so hypnotic it’s beginning to interfere with my work. It’s called Electric Sheep and it’s the brainchild of Scott Draves, an incredible electronic artist living in San Francisco. It’s called Electric Sheep in honor of one of my favorite scifi novels, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” (If you saw the movie BladeRunner, with Harrison Ford, you saw a much-modified excerpt from that book)

According to the electricsheep site, the screensaver is based on animating fractal algorithms (something that’s fascinated me for decades). Draves uses a peering arrangement to share computing resources and bubble the most popular animations to the top. Essentially, whenever the screensaver is loaded (and connected to the Web), part of its computing resources are donated to rendering new animations. Users can vote on favorite sheep, which then appear more often.

The images across the top are samples shot from my computer–I’m getting so hung up on these things that I’m snapping photos with my digital camera when my favorite sheep whizz by. It’s MUCH better than a screen aquarium.

You can download the screensaver directly from the site–it’s open source–and it works on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. You can also use a tool called Apophysis to manipulate the algorithms and design your own sheep…which can be uploaded back into the system for rendering and display to the world.

The electricsheep system is not small–you can spend a couple hundred megabytes on hard drive space, it eats every nanosecond of bandwidth you can give it, and it’s certainly a time-waster–but it’s worth it.

Fascinating stuff.

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