Electric Sheep

1. Media text: electricsheep.org

"Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

You may take a tour of the sheep web site and related documents. Don't miss the archive and lineages of top sheep from the current generation. "

2. Texts

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Terranova, Network Cultures

3. Electric Sheep embodies and problematizes the question of the materiality of information as raised by both N. Katherine Hayles and Tiziana Terranova. While Hayles emphasizes narrative as a device to historicize the cybernetic privileging of pattern and randomness over materiality with regard to information, Terranova insists on the status of information as material as central to a conception of information flows.

Electric Sheep foregrounds several topical concerns present in both texts. In particular, it brings to light Terranova's interest in information as a milieu, since the screen saver's evolution happens in a space of informational flows between "sleeping" computers. Moreover, the programming of "a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over" into Electric Sheep is a reinscription of scientific conceptions of genetics into an informational realm. Terranova writes, "To the decoding of the mass into a network culture, to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of a multitude, corresponds an over-coding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code modelled on the biological notion of the gene" (NC 123). How does Terranova's conception of the "mass" work in dialogue with the free labor embodied by Electric Sheep (to which users can submit their own designs)? Moreover, the fact that these users can "vote" for particular sheep by touching designated keys on the keyboard while the computer sleeps raises questions of control.

Taking its name from a Philip K. Dick novel, Electric Sheep recalls Hayles' insistence that narrative and scientific realms interpenetrated one another to imagine and produce technological realities. In particular, her notion of the pov and interest in visibility is important for Electric Sheep. The notion of computers dreaming speaks to her interest in the cyborg: dreaming is an activity traditionally reserved for human beings, where sight becomes central to the experience. In contrast, a computer monitor functions as a display, and Electric Sheep ostensibly was created for human users who wanted to see a computer develop interesting and (one could say) beautiful visualizations.

I am interested in exploring the questions raised above specifically through the lens of space and embodiment in space. How does something like Electric Sheep provide a grounds for exploring informational milieus and questions of identity and embodiment?