What seems most interesting to me about Electric Sheep is its aesthetic dimension. Of course, we can debate about the fractals that the sheep servers generate, whether they constitute an aesthetic experience or not, but for the sake of argument, I?m just going to assert that they qualify.
There are numerous distributed computing projects, from seti@home to the failed Lycos DOS spam screen saver which have utilized spare cycles on people?s desktops around the world. While both of these cases are different, they both rely on the donation model that people want to lend cpu power to different ends. And of course, this is interesting in that these models for computing power are based on altruism and (at least in the case of seti@home) seem to be at least a minimally effective at doing large scale distributed computing.
Whether or not altruism can be an effective method for doing distributed computing is an interesting question to consider, but I think that Electric Sheep adds a completely different dimension to this inquiry. What seems most unique is that distributed computing that Electric Sheep does is not for an end outside of aesthetics- those who run the screen saver get to watch it, and the more their computers participate in the creation of the these fractals, the more fractals there are to see.
This seems to me to be such an entirely different dimension of why one might participate in distributed processing. Where seti@home and other projects have very clear goals with their processing, Electric Sheep just gives us more mesmerizing images.
I think it is tempting to talk about the communal nature of people giving up cpu cycles for the generation of aesthetics, that there is an underlying utopian vision of expanding our aesthetic experience of life. I think this would be a mistake. To make such a claim, I think we?d need to be able to explicate a community, demonstrate that there were similar goals and direction. Looking around electricsheep.org, there isn?t much evidence of this. I just happen to know about it because of Kellan.
Instead of an underlying utopian prefiguration which I wish most opensource projects were built on, Electric Sheep seems to use a similar eerie anonymousness that pervades the internet. Of course, this isn?t a criticism of Electric Sheep, it?s a point that the process of creation doesn?t depend on any level of real community. I have no idea who else participates in the creation of the beautiful images that fill my screens, and little recourse to finding out who they are. Yes, of course it?s possible to do so, but the point more is that the process of creating this aesthetic experience is so different from anything else that I?m confronted by in my daily life.
Of course, humans don?t make these images. Computers do. Humans may have programmed it, but this ad hock web of computers that does it for us. And while I still find some of the fractals haunting, I think it is interesting to consider what it means when an anonymous group of individuals help generate an aesthetic experience based on altruism.
I don?t think Electric Sheep is revolutionary. I do think it challenges us to think about the process of living in a world where experiences in our daily lives based on aesthetics are rare enough to prompt me to write about a screen saver. There also seems to be some fundamental kernel of alienation and a dialectical negation and transformation that prompts its functionality.
Living in a world where life experience has been stripped so bare of aesthetic joy, where people are so divided from one another that terms politics and community are on some levels parodies of themselves, the idea that a computer program helps bring individual human experiences closer together is a farce. Yet, the very alienation that so viciously drives human experience apart is precisely what creates the circumstances for something like Electric Sheep to work. No, Electric Sheep doesn?t help render human society self conscious as art and media ought to, but it does shine a dim light into our daily lives, suggesting that there ought to be more aesthetic experiences and society at large ought to help create them.
Post new comment