Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Electric Sheep’ Category

From here.

The green bacterial looking clusters in the final sequence before it evolves into a blur – that is one of the coolest artistic abstractions I’ve ever seen. But I think the whole sequence is breathtaking.

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, I’m a huge fan of these “Electric Sheep” images and the screensaver.  This morning I’ve started describing it in more detail at my Wiki page.

I’ve figured some basic ways to create my own original “children” Sheep by cross-breeding Sheep that someone else designed.  I’ve rendered them at a resolution to please virtually any computer “wallpaper” collector.  In the following two galleries, the link that says “open full image (click) ” is your friend

The first gallery is of the “parents” whose genes I crossed to create various children.  (Adobe Flash is required to view the galleries.)

The following gallery is of the “children” (original creations!) whom I thought were pretty.  (I killed the others.)  Some of these were found by panning, zooming, and scrolling through their loop animation with Apophysis.  Again the “open full image (click)” link is your friend.

Feel free to use and reuse these for any purpose.  The license is Creative Commons attrib. share-alike – and I request credit given to Richard Alexander Hall in reuse.  If you make derivative works from these, they’re completely yours.

I’d wait until I’ve added these to a page to market them as available for print on a huge poster (+ 2′ x 4′, like this one), but I haven’t the patience.  (I want to redesign that whole pick-a-sheep page as a blog page, anyway).  I’ve created some pretty things, and the world must know about it now!

Based on feedback I got from a post I made to the Electric Sheep user’s forum (here – including from the creator of the screen saver himself!) on the.. electric fleece? – I updated them.  Many ready-to-order examples at my zazzle page.

I’ve mentioned this electric sheep screen saver. Here’s one mpg from it.

I may find a way to batch convert them and incorporate them into the blog design. That won’t make it impossible for you to read.. Click either “play now” or “play in popup” to see it. If either of those don’t work, click the download link and have a look at it in Windows Media Player.

The screen saver has downloaded a bajillion of these goodies into its cache on my machine. Eye candy. I think this one is morphing between four different “sheep” IDs.

I ran across this today and tried it – so worth it.

It’s a screen-saver that does mutating, “genetic” computer-generated animated art for your screen-saver, and distributes these across the internet to everyone else who has the screen-saver installed, and users can vote for or against the various “electric sheep” (up arrow key votes yes, down votes no) so that cooler ones get promoted.  I took the following image from the sites gallery of current images (which fluctuates – they render new “sheep” images from user’s machines during idle time/bandwidth) and scaled it up – it’s a desktop now.

This is a link to the image because the thumbnail isn’t working for some reason.

I love that MATRIX screen-saver I found and will probably go back to it from time to time.  Meanwhile, this.