draves scott - the flame algortihm

The Flame Algorithm and its Open SourceCulture

Authors - Scott Draves and Isabel Walcott Draves

What is the relationship between man and machine? Is open source a sustainableway to organize cultural creativity? Can digital creations have the subtlety weknow in the natural world? Can computers be creative? Computer scientist andsoftware artist Scott Draves has made a life's work out of asking and trying to findanswers to these questions.

As a young teenager in the early 80s, Scott Draves began programming real-timeanimation on an Apple II personal computer. Because he was both producer andconsumer of this experience, he was not interested in using the computer as apredictable automaton to do his bidding. Instead he looked for ways the computercould do something unexpected, to program complex behavior that held hisattention, getting more out than he put in.

Later, as a freshman in the math department at Brown University in 1987, hebegan writing programs to create iterated function systems roughly, imagesmade up of smaller versions of themselves [Barnsley 1988]. The first version wasin PostScript and ran on the original LaserWriter. His interests soon led him to theGraphics Research Group, where he rewrote this idea many times, includinganimation and 3D, but using ordinary graphics libraries and workstations forrendering.

As a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, he got asummer internship at NTT Data in Japan. With access to an SGI supercomputerand suddently unconstrained, for the first time he was able to solve his equationscompletely to reveal the beauty contained within them. The algorithm treats everypixel as a variable in an equation with thousands of parameters. The parametersspecify a collection of functions from the plane to the plane, and the algorithmvisualizes the interference pattern between them. This is the origin of the Flamealgorithm, a combination of fractals with a particle system [Draves and Reckase2003]. The results are distinctive, recognizable, and extremely diverse.

At the suggestion of a mentor, Draves submitted this work to the Prix ArsElectronica competition. One of the very earliest, Flame #149, won a Prix ArsHonorary Mention in 1993. The nascent World Wide Web was a perfect place toshare the Flame algorithm and images, and inspired by his background in scienceand his love of the emacs editor and the GNU philosophy, Draves decided torelease it as open source on his personal page in the CS department. This was,quite possibly, the earliest application of the General Public License (GPL) to art.

The Flame Algorithm and its Open Source Culture siggrap... http://www.siggraph.org/publications/newsletter/volume-44-...

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Spawning a Genre

From Animatrix 2003 "Matriculated" directed by Peter Chung

The decision to open-source Flame turned out to be seminal to creating a newgenre. Since then, Draves' code (now located at flam3.com) has been copied,expanded, ported, and rewritten. Every day, people all over the world createFlames.Because Flame is an algorithm and an API, not an end-user application, one ofthe first things to happen was the creation of graphical user interfaces to allownon-programmers to create Flames. At first were plugins for Photoshop (as part ofKai's Power Tools) and Adobe AfterEffects (by Andrew Davidson). Flame is onmillions of desktops worldwide, having shipped standard with Linux for years inthe GIMP.

Flames quickly spread, but the images themselves stood still. Draves, and others,wanted to animate them, but the problem lay in creating quality resolutionanimations when rendering each frame took literally hours. In 1999, Draveslearned about the new SETI@home project [Anderson 2002], which harnessesthe downtime of a network of participating desktops to co-opt their processors andcrunch numbers, sending results back to the server. A pivotal conversation withfellow computer scientist Nick Thompson marked the conception of a similarapproach to render Flame animations. Programming the first version of theElectric Sheep for Linux OS took Draves a week. It was, and still is, an opensource downloadable program that makes use of participants' CPUs to renderFlame animations frame by frame and share the results among all users [Draves2005, 2006, 2007].

Results are uploaded to the server, where they are compiled into short videos thatplay back on users' computers as a screensaver. As the news spread, thousandsof people downloaded the free screensaver. The more users who ran theprogram, the more frames were rendered and the more animations were created,quickly reaching into thousands upon thousands of animations. The trajectory ofthe Flame algorithm was instantly and irrevocably transformed.

Stand-alone Applications


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Screenshot of Apophysis, a Flame editing GUI by Mark Townsend et al.The image is Electric Sheep 244.01029, designed by the genetic algorithm

As the Electric Sheep screensaver and render farm grew in popularity, Draves andother willing volunteers like Erik Reckase and Dean Gaudet added to the Flamecode and the Electric Sheep code. Reckase and Draves made substantialimprovements to the algorithm including the addition of Density Estimation, whichuses a dynamic filter to smooth out the noise remaining from undersampled areaswith few particles without making the well sampled areas blurry. Reckase has nowtaken on responsibility for the code and rewritten it to run much faster and useless memory.

Versions of Electric Sheep were created independently for Mac, and much later,PC. Before long, stand-alone GUI apps to design Flames appeared such asAphophysis for Windows in 2004, Oxidizer for Mac in 2006, Qosmic for Linux in2008, Apo3d in 2009, Flam4 for GPUs, and the cross-platform Fr0st in 2009.Following Flame's open source GPL licensing, these applications are all alsoGPL.

The creation of Apophysis by Mark Townsend made it easier for everydaynon-programmers to make Flames with much more control than the old andlimited plugins. The proliferation of great Flames being developed inspired Dravesto invite people to submit them to the Electric Sheep. There, they are turned intoanimations and have a chance to contribute their genes to the reproductivesystem of the Electric Sheep, which was already based on Darwinian evolutionwith mutation and crossover, an idea inspired by Karl Sims [1991]. Viewers vote"up" or "down" on sheep and the popular designs get to mate, contributing theirvirtual dna to their offspring in a continuous process of death and rebirth carriedout by the program. Hence a human design team began to collaborate andcompete with the genetic algorithm. It pioneered fine-grained collaboration on theinternet and illustrated the process by which the more attention we give


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something, the more detail and structure appears.

A Do-It-Yourself Culture

Print and web advertisement for a ping pong brand

At this point in our story, we've seen how the original decision to open-source theFlame algorithm led to plug-ins that allowed ordinary people to create still Flames.The release of a free screensaver popularized Flames, inspiring the developmentof stand-alone GUI programs to make creating them even easier.

Opening up the render farm to allow users to make the processor-intensiveanimated Sheep themselves led to the rise of dedicated designers like ChrisUrsitti (Ursitti), Coppercat, and Sylvie Gallet (cqfd93). These experts challengethemselves and each other to explore new styles of sheep design, and satisfy thepublic's voting. Finally, CreativeCommons licensing meant anyone who wanted tocould reuse and remix Flames as they created their own content.

The impact of the decision to open source Flames and use CreativeCommonslicensing for Sheep is that there are thousands of YouTube videos and homemademusic videos that use Electric Sheep animations; award-winning artists that haveincorporated Flame images into their work; books, films, magazines and comicsthat use the images; t-shirts, advertisements, television shows that use Flames;Electric Sheep video clips for sale as stock footage; Flame prints for sale all overthe Internet; VJs and nightclubs running the Electric Sheep, Flame wallpaper,Flame skins for Google Chrome and the Google homepage... the list (hyperlink toanchor for the list below) goes on and on. One of the highpoints was the honor ofSiggraph selecting a Flame image designed by the Electric Sheep for theirgraphic identity in 2008, where it appeared on the web site, t-shirts, posters, andvideo screens all over the conference.


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Most of the time it's exciting to see how far the Flame algorithm has spread, forexample, the other day when Draves was idly flipping through a magazinededicated to Ping Pong at a friend's house and saw a Flame image advertisingthe Gambler Outlaw Ping Pong Paddle or when a fan emailed a link to a comicbook cover featuring the Green Lantern and a green Flame.

These days there are many open source graphics packages, but nearly all ofthem are based on the standard metaphors of the pen and camera, hence theirresults are undistinguished. Flames are different because they are immediatelyrecognizable.

On the other hand, relinquishing control over who uses your work and how canlead to some disappointing uses the artist would not otherwise have condoned,like profiteering initiatives that combine the use of Flames with fake science for"healing" and weight-loss. Notwithstanding that loss of control, the use of OpenSource has been a boon for Draves and society at large. Each step along theway, the more open the process has been, the more programmers, artists,designers and ordinary people have gotten involved with Flames.

As a generative artist, Draves work is not only about the images and animationsthat he creates, but the interactive and participation and creativity the softwarespurs in others.

Business Ramifications


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Cover of book The Store of Science by Joy Hakim, published by theSmithsonian

Can giving source code away for free be a sustainable practice? Draves'philosophy is that all creators "stand on the shoulders of giants", requiringprevious work to be accessible. It would feel wrong in his gut to create his work,which he considers an initiative in the scientific tradition, without this openness.But there are other advantages as well.

Open source code is a magnet for the labor and skills of other progammers, whohave contributed vastly to the Flame family of apps and plug-ins, growing it farbeyond what Draves could have accomplished on his own. The efforts of thisenterprising team of programmers introduced Flames to many new fans. Ingenerative art, the artist gives up control of the creative act to their own software.Open source is the extension of this idea, where the artist gives up control of thesoftware itself.

In the case of the Electric Sheep this also applies to the genetic codes, images,and animations created by the system, all of which are shared under CreativeCommons licensing. This allows artists (not just programmers) to participate viareuse and remixing which provides incredible viral marketing power. Thousands ofdo-it-yourself images of Flames and Sheep all over the web have a commentsection where someone asks "where is this from?" Someone says "it's done inApophysis" or "check out electricsheep.org" and another fan is born.

There are trickle-down effects too. The software engineers who wrote successfulprograms based on Flame gained new respect and their own user base.Professional graphic designers who incorporate Flames freely into their work,often not knowing anything about the work that has gone into making Flames


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available, certainly profit from them.

However, for the majority of the programmers and designers, both professionalsand amateurs, who work extensively with the Flame algorithm, it's more likely tobe a passionate hobby than a moneymaking endeavor. Although Draves verymuch wants the Electric Sheep to become self-sustaining, so far it has been alabor of love, costing countless dollars to maintain and grow, plus volunteer laborand donated server space. Donations have been much appreciated, but aredwarfed by expenses.

Starting in 2006, Draves uses the part-human, part-machine cyborg mind tocreate award-winning high-resolution, limited edition and custom fine art, which issold to support operations. A membership/subscription service is underdevelopment, as are other experimental business models such as iPhone apps.

The question of how to support creativity in the digital age is a profound one facedby programmers, musicians, and artists of all stripes. We have no definitiveanswer, but we remain optimistic and committed to our philosophy. The nature ofinformation is to replicate and evolve. We believe in working with nature ratherthan against it.

Conclusion

Loka, a music video by Glenn Marshall (Prix Ars Electronica winner)

Making the decision to open source one's art is a philosophical statement insupport of creating a better society, one with more creativity that is moreparticipatory, less prepackaged and broadcast. An artist who makes open-sourceartwork actively relinquishes control, realizing that others will use it forquestionable ends. But the artistic rewards Draves has received by sharing thecode have been tremendous. It has been vastly expanded by contributions fromall over the world and totally rewritten in 2009. Flames have become their owngenre, currently ranking 7th in Google under the search term "Flames". ScottDraves has spawned an immense loosely joined worldwide community ofdesigners, programmers, and passionate fans. The open sourcing of the flamealgorithm and how our culture has responded to it show how the free flow ofinformation allows an artist to exceed their own boundaries.


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About the authors

Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot

is a software artist living in New York City. He is best known as the creatorof the Electric Sheep, a continually evolving abstract animation with 350,000unique participants each month. He created the Flame Algorithm in 1991,the Fuse Algorithm (the first implementation of nonparametric texturesynthesis) in 1993, and the Bomb visual-musical instrument in 1995. He wonprizes from the Prix Ars Electronica and VIDA 2.0 and 4.0, his work ispermanently hosted on MoMA.org, and has been covered by DiscoverMagazine, the New Yorker, and Wired. His artworks are installed in the GatesCenter of Computer Science at CMU, Google's headquarters, and WillowGarage, in addition to private collections nationally. Draves has a PhD inComputer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS inMathematics from Brown University.

Isabel Walcott Draves

is the business manager of Spotworks LLC, the organization supportingElectricSheep.org and software artist Scott Draves. Additionally, she is atech startup consultant and an expert in strategic Internet marketing, socialmedia, and online communities. Ms. Draves started the first onlinecommunity written by teenage girls for teenage girls, SmartGirl.com, whereshe was CEO from 1996 until its acquisition in 2001 by the Institute forResearch on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Ms. Draveshas a masters in Communications, Computing and Technology from


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Columbia University and a bachelors degree with honors in Literature fromHarvard College.

Bibliography

ANDERSON, D. et al 2002. Seti@home: An experiment in public-resourcecomputing. Communications of the ACM, 45:5661.

BARNSLEY, M. 1988. Fractals Everywhere. Academic Press.

DRAVES, S. and RECKASE, E. 2003 The fractal flame algorithm. http://flam3.com/flame.pdf. (revised and expanded in 2008).

DRAVES, S. 2007. Evolution and Collective Intelligence of the Electric Sheep. Artof Artificial Evolution, Romero, J. and Machado, P. eds. Springer Verlag.

DRAVES, S. 2006. The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity. InNon-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, ACM (invited keynote).

DRAVES, S. 2005. The Electric Sheep screen-saver: A case study in aestheticevolution. In Applications of Evolutionary Computing, LNCS 3449, SpringerVerlag.

SIMS, K. 1991. Artificial evolution for computer graphics. In Proceedings ofSIGGRAPH, ACM.

TAYLOR, R. and SPROTT J.C. 2008. Biophilic Fractals and the Visual Journey ofOrganic Screen-savers. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol.12, No. 1, pp. 117-129.


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draves scott - the flame algortihm

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