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== Biography ==
Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a visual and software artist living in New
York City. Draves is best known as the creator of the Electric Sheep,
a continually evolving abstract animation with over 60,000 daily
participants.

Draves was born in the year 1968. He got his first computer when he
was around ten years old and taught himself how to program. He earned
a Bachelor's in mathematics at Brown University in 1990. His love of
computers persisted and he found himself in Tokyo at 23 years old
working with an SGI supercomputer. Given his new processing power,
Draves was left to tinker with particles and other complex systems
without the usual time constraints. During this summer, he created the
original “fractal flame” algorithm. He then continued on to Carnegie
Mellon University for his PhD in computer science. While he was there,
he submitted some of the work that he had done in Japan to the Prix
Ars Electronica, an international competition for technology and
science related art. He received an honorable mention for his work,
which encouraged him to pursue his dream of being a digital artist.
Draves began VJing (Video Jockey) for parties under the nickname
“Spot”. He graduated with his PhD in 1997 for a thesis on
metaprogramming for media processing. In 1999, Draves put out the
first version of “electric sheep”, a program that creates fractals and
transfers them as screensavers to user’s computers. The users then
rate the fractal and the data is fed back into a genetic system that
will produce the next generation of fractals. This system grew in
popularity to the point that by 2001, Draves no longer completely
understood the genetic code of the sheep. He hired a team of 5 other
programmers to help him sort it out. They set up a new feature in
which people could interactively change the genome of a sheep, see the
results, and submit it to the server (gene pool). Draves describes
electric sheep as cyborg mind, fusing the collective intelligence of
thousands of people with an algorithm into something new. In 2004,
Draves created “Dreams in High Fidelity”, an installation art work
that uses some of Draves’ favorite sheep, render in super high
resolution. He currently lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in
New York. His day job is working for Google as a software engineer.


== Generative Works ==
Draves is responsible for creating a class of fractal that he calls
“flames”. These flames are part of the iterated function system class,
which is a method of constructing fractals that results in self
similarity. Fractal flames differ from normal iterated functions in
that they use nonlinear functions in their iteration instead of affine
transformations. Also, flames are colored by the way that they are
drawn rather than by the final density of particles at the end, more
clearly highlighting details.

He used these fractals to design his “Electric Sheep” software. This
is a genetic system that is distributed to the public over the
internet. It generates fractals using distributed processing based
upon a current genome in the servers. The users of the software vote
on which fractals or “sheep” they enjoy most and that data is used to
influence which sheep get to have their genetic information passed on.
The most recent flock of sheep can be viewed at:
[http://v2d7c.sheepserver.net/cgi/best.cgi]


== Quotes and Bibliography ==



== External Links ==

== Credits ==

This entry was written by Chris Garcia