Scott Draves - Software Artist

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Cover of Paul Simon's latest album.

In a Super Bowl ad for IBM Watson and HRBlock.

Cover of Stephen Hawking's latest book.

Still frame from the film "The Animatrix".

Promotional graphics for the NVidia website. (g)

Still frame from the music video "Loka", by Glenn Marshall using Apophysis. (c)

Stock video footage sold by Artbeats Footage Hub. (c)

Openness

"I feel rewarded when someone looks at one of my pictures, but I get a larger feeling when someone uses my software to create their own pictures. And best of all is when someone tinkering with the source code improves the program, then disseminates their new version."
    - Scott Draves

Coming from a scientific background, Scott Draves has seen firsthand how sharing discoveries can shape the course of the future. Although much art today is based on proprietary and even competitive drivers, Draves prefers to follow in the scientific tradition and make his software art open source. This enables him to benefit from additions that others make to the software he originally created, and it allows him to watch as his work spreads throughout the artistic and commercial graphic design world. Users creating work using software derived from Draves' open source code are not required to attribute their work to Draves; in fact many do not know that they are using software originated by Draves.

In a similarly open manner, Draves has directed that the images and animations taken from the Electric Sheep Project be Creative Commons licensed. This means that the community may use images and animations free of charge for non-commercial purposes as long as they credit Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep.

You may watch a video documentary, or read the article published by Siggraph.

Have you made something cool with Scott Draves' software? Seen a flame lately? Seen the electric sheep grazing somewhere? Submit your sighting!

For questions about reuse requirements for the electric sheep, see electricsheep.org. To use images without attribution or for commercial purposes, contact the artist for licensing requirements.

Sightings of Scott Draves' work in the wild*

Film and Television:

- Super Bowl ad for IBM Watson and HRBlock (c)

- Animatrix (c)

- CBS Threshold (c)

- The Last Mimzy (g)

- Richard 'Doc' Baily(g, eg Solaris)

Media and Advertising:

- "An Introduction to Turbulent Flow"; book by Jean Mathieu and Julian Scott (c)

- NVidia website (g)

- EVGA GeForce Video Card (g)

- World Science Festival (g)

- Stock Footage sold by Artbeats (c)

Software:

- Fr0st cross-platform flame editor

- Apophysis freeware flame editor for Windows

- Adobe Photoshop "FraxFlameII" plugin

- The Gimp "flame"

- Adobe AfterEffects "AEflame" plugin

- Qosmic flame editor for Linux

- Oxidizer flame editor for Mac

Art:

- Boise Cooperative Laboratories (c)

- Brian Knep (c, inspired by Bomb)

- Patrick Lichty; The Grid(c, used Bomb)

- Electric Sheep in 3D virtual world 3DJay (photo credit: accrete)

- Nell Tenhaaf; Neonudism (c, used Bomb)

- Glenn Marshall (c)

- electricsheep.org

* * * * *

*We can't always tell whether someone has used Scott Draves' software, so we have to guess. You'll see a symbol to the right of each link noting whether we have confirmed (c) or guessed (g). If you would like to confirm that an example was made using Draves' code or flame images, or your work has been included incorrectly in this list, please let us know.