Electric Sheep is a collaborative artwork in which computers connected over the internet display and help create continuously evolving fractal animations known as sheep.
The project combines distributed computing with audience participation. Viewers can vote for animations they favour, influencing which sheep survive and reproduce. Mutation and crossover are then used to generate subsequent generations, producing an evolving shared collection rather than a fixed set of animations.
Electric Sheep uses the fractal flame technique created by Scott Draves. The original client repository now serves as an archive, while the artwork and its next-generation client continue through the wider project.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Displays continuously evolving abstract animations based on fractal flames.
- Uses a distributed client/server architecture to share artwork between participating computers.
- Allows computers to contribute rendering work to the generation of future animations.
- Lets viewers vote for favourite sheep while watching them.
- Uses genetic algorithms to influence which animations survive and reproduce.
- Applies mutation and crossover to generate new visual forms from successful sheep.
- Builds a shared global collection rather than generating artwork entirely in isolation.
- Uses FLAM3 technology for rendering and manipulating fractal flames.
- Allows artists to design their own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.
- Can operate as a screensaver on Linux desktop systems.
- Streams completed animations rather than requiring every displayed sheep to be rendered locally.
- Combines human aesthetic choices with algorithmic evolution to influence the resulting artwork.
Website: github.com/e-dream-ai/client
Support:
Developer: Scott Draves
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Electric Sheep is written in C and C++. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Fractal Tools | |
|---|---|
| Mandelbulber v2 | Creatively generate three-dimensional fractals |
| JWildfire | Very powerful and flexible flame fractal generator |
| Gnofract 4D | Four-dimensional, inter-relational Mandelbrot and Julia set generator |
| XaoS | Real-time interactive fractal zoomer |
| NextFractal | Create amazing fractal images and other algorithmically generated images |
| Rsfrac | Terminal-based fractal explorer written in Rust |
| Fraqtive | Draws Mandelbrot and Julia fractals |
| Electric Sheep | Screensaver showing collective dream of sleeping computers |
| Qosmic | Cosmic recursive flame fractal editor |
| Fractals Explorer | Render and explore fractals in real time |
| Par Fractal | GPU-accelerated renderer for exploring 2D and 3D fractals |
| Fractorium | Qt-based fractal flame edito |
| FractGen | Extensible tool for generating and exploring fractal images |
| Fractalshades | Create static and interactive fractal visualizations |
| fractal-generator | Mandelbrot and Julia fractal generator |
| FLAM3 | Cosmic recursive fractal flames |
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