Scott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

project

Electric Sheep Electric Sheep is a volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver. Process The process is transparent to the casual user, w ...

. He also invented patch-based

texture synthesis Texture synthesis is the process of algorithmically constructing a large digital image from a small digital sample image by taking advantage of its structural content. It is an object of research in computer graphics and is used in many fields, amo ...

and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms. He is also a

video artist Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. ...

and accomplished VJ. In summer 2010, Draves' work was exhibited at Google's New York City office, including his video piece "Generation 243" which was generated by the collaborative influences of 350,000 people and computers worldwide. Stephen Hawking's 2010 book The Grand Design used an image generated by Draves' "flame" algorithm on its cover. Known as "Spot," Draves currently resides in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. In July 2012 Draves won the

ZKM The ZKM , Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989. and since 1997 is located in a listed industrial building in Karlsruhe, Germany, a former muni ...

App Art Award Special Prize for Cloud Art for the mobile Android version of Electric Sheep.

Background

Draves earned a Bachelor's in mathematics at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

, where he was a student of Andy van Dam before continuing on to earn a PhD in computer science at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. At CMU he studied under Andy Witkin,

Dana Scott Dana Stewart Scott (born October 11, 1932) is an American logician who is the emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University; he is now retired and lives in Berkeley, Ca ...

, and Peter Lee.

References

External links

* Computer programmers American digital artists Fractal artists Psychedelic artists American video artists Brown University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people 1968 births Mathematical artists {{US-compu-bio-stub