“Sheep Vortex” Premiere Tonight at 9pm

Events

Tonight, check it out! Scott Draves will have a premiere of one of his latest artworks, Sheep Vortex, with 3D design by Somatika Xiao, at the Node Zero Gallery in SecondLife, tonight (March 13, 2008) at 6pm-9pm PST. This is based on his Electric Sheep, which is now featured in the permanent online collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA.org).

About 10 or 15 years ago, some of my graduate students were interested mainly in computer graphics, not programming languages. One reason for this, I think, was my work on things like partial evaluation and run-time code generation, which was a fairly active research area in the 1980’s and into the mid-1990’s. These ideas have some relevance to computer graphics, particularly rendering problems, so much so that even some of my non-graphics students ended up working on rendering. Mark Leone and I, for example, did some of the early academic research on compiling for fast run-time code generation. Mark is now a rendering expert and software engineer at Pixar, with movie credits including Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Ratatouille.

Scott Draves (aka “Spot”), was another student of mine. He also did some of the early research into the possibilities of partial evaluation and run-time code generation for interactive media applications. In his dissertation, he proposed a programming language just for this purpose. After leaving CMU with his Ph.D., Spot went to work for a while at Transmeta and then later at FastForward (which then got swallowed up by Inktomi and then in turn by Yahoo!). Throughout all of this, Spot was always doing some very interesting art and interactive media and now, today, is a full-time artist.

Spot’s art blends music, interaction, and evolution into a constantly changing, active, and interactive visual experience. Built as a screensaver that harvests the spare computing cycles of about 60,000 computers, Electric Sheep breed and morph into mesmerizing “life forms”. Here are a couple of still shots of some recently bred Electric Sheep:

If you come to my office you can see a couple of small, high-resolution stills that are hanging in my office — gifts from Spot. To get the full effect, though, you really must install the screensaver, available at electricsheep.org. Or, even better, check out (or even buy) one of the Dreams in High Fidelity installations, at Google and other places. The constant movement, evolution, and “life” of Electric Sheep are mindblowing.

Electric Sheep have recently been curated into the online exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, at the Museum of Modern Art, and will be hosted permanently at MoMA.org. (Check it out — it’s really cool!) Spot’s work has also been exhibited widely, not only in the art world but also in computer science. For example, the “graphic identity” for SIGGRAPH 2008 is based on Electric Sheep. Venues such as the Wired Blog and Leonardo have also featured Spot’s work.

Hope to see some of you at the SecondLife exhibition tonight…

To conclude, developments like Sheep Vortex only deepen my conviction that there is a tremendous opportunity to expand human experience through the marriage of art with interactive media. Here in the CS Department, we’ll be moving ahead quickly to create a critical mass of activities like this.

Peter Lee @ March 13, 2008