Electric Sheep, an open source screensaver, is a complex and evolving little project. Created by Scott Draves, this program, upon installation, communicates/dreams with other computers running the program. Spawned from this process are the “Sheep,” or visualization algorithms. Users are free to upload their visualizations to the Electric Sheep server, and users can vote yea or nea (or bah) from any computer running the program and connected to the internet. As votes are collected, the submitted Sheep are refined, and the Flock evolves in the most eye-pleasing fashion possible. Successful generations of Sheep will reproduce and mutate, and the result is an ever-changing spectacle that’s great to watch while you’re high bored.

Scott Draves took an unorthodox route to making art–he earned a BA in mathematics, then a PhD in computer science. With his programming skills and passion for VJing, he created visualizations like Electric Sheep. Dreams in High Fidelity, a further evolution of Electric Sheep, is a limited series of professionalized Sheep, installed in various locations:

“The artist selects his favorite sheep from the archives and public flock, and sends them back to be re-rendered at high fidelity: heaven for an electric sheep. This new flock has grown to 100GB, totaling 18 hours if played end-to-end, and requiring over 200 years to render on a single computer.”

Philip K. Dick would be proud.