I met Scott Draves, or "Spot" as he is better known for his nickname on the web, for dinner tonight in Chelsea.  Spot moved to NYC from San Francisco two months ago to get art gallery representation and hopefully, he's closer to it, judging from our conversation tonight.

This interview came about as a result of attending Spot's appearance at the Entheocentric Salon in Chelsea last Saturday which I covered in depth at SmartMobs.com and ArtNewYorkCity.com.   I'll focus on the metrics of Spot's websites and blogs as well as his vision for Electronic Sheep.

One of the things Scott/Spot returned to, as we dined in the nice Italian Resturant on the corner of W.21st street and 7th Avenue, is his ability to "communicate" with computers - to put in programming with the output being considerably more than the input - and wondering about the intelligence of machines as an artificial life form.

http://electricsheep.org/ gets ~ 1000 "hits" a day according to Spot, who wrote his own web analytics program that reads his server log files.   But, Scott Draves also mentioned he gets 45,000 uniques per day using his Electronic Sheep Screen saver program and he is able to pull that data out of his server logs as well.  It might be that Spot is getting a thousand downloads a day of the screensaver and that's what the 1000 hits represent while the 45,000 uniques are the actual users of his screensaver at any one time.   I don't know for sure - that's what I wrote down.

Scott Draves more high end electronic paintings are shown at http://hifidreams.com/ where ….

"….The animations are rendered by the Electric Sheep, but at triple the resolution and with more stately motion. The image quality is striking on a large display. It requires 20x the computation to make a high fidelity sheep, and it shows."

I saw some examples of Spot's high resolution Electronic Paintings at COSM Saturday night but there were technical difficulties that prevented Spot from projecting his paintings on the walls of the Entheocentric Salon - Spot flew in from San Francisco the night before with three laptops that were first lost and then partially damaged in flight - and it was not till Tuesday evening - three days later, that he found out the cause (a loose cable in a video chip output).

While having dinner with Spot I became aware of he was very "plugged in" with what's happening both in the world of computer art and online journalism, having been interviewed by Wired Magazine and Boing Boing several times (and I wrote about the traffic being written about by Boing Boing can create, last summer).

Scott Draves was actually an originator on open sourced programming and art forms used by others, sometimes without giving him credit.  Certainly, Spot helped teach Scott Snibbe  and Golan Levin programming and was probably instrumental in their development as artists.  And now Scott Draves is here, in NYC, to show his high resolution Electronic Paintings. 

I think every artist believes their own work is the best, or attempting to improve what exists or should exist, that's why artists create in the first place.  When Paul Cezanne was asked whose paintings he liked the best… he said "mine" if they work right (don't recall if these were Cezanne's exact words, but I think the meaning is intact.

Spot mentioned that his work at hifidreams.com (example above) is more polished than the electricsheep.org screensaver (which I just downloaded, BTW).  The electric sheep that Spot created evolve online with user interaction but the appearance of the electric sheep are limited due to bandwidth and server issues that, at present, prevent ElectricSheep.org from being all it can be.

Spot/Scott calls his higher resolution paintings an example of the "Vegas Effect"  though I'm not sure what he meant by that.  In fact, according to BLDG BLOG

"…And you thought it was just a large paved area in the middle of the desert: turns out Las Vegas is where all that rare wine, Kobe beef and luxury clothing – all those master sommeliers, over-lit liquor stores, tattoo parlors and palm trees – have gone. Vegas, that is, has been buying everything. "

The Electric Sheep that Spot creates for hifidreams.com are created/selected by him, are a reflection of his artistic creativity (as opposed to the online Electric Sheep in the Electricsheep.org screensaver which evolve over the internet) and are in much higher resolution - therefore, much more enjoyable to look at than the online, low resolution version.

I asked Spot what he thought about the Wild Divine biofeedback game - he likes the concept but thinks the graphics are primitive, somewhat classical and limited.  Since I own two copies of Wild Divine, but hardly every play it, I agree with Spot that Wild Divine is an interesting game, but way too niche and limited to reach it's full potential.  In fact, I'd like to see the biofeedback device use BlueTooth instead of wires and have the entire game take place in Second Life with real interaction between avatars who are hooked up to humans with biofeedback devices.  I have felt for some time that Wild Divine was an interesting concept and device, but the application was way to limited for it to fully succeed.  I think both Spot and I agree on this.

I also don't like the cheesy Deepak Chopra self promotion that, for me, interferes with the game's enjoyment. I don't know how many others share my feeling about the annoying appearances of Deepak Chopra in Wild Divine.  I hope if the game ever does get into Second Life - he stays out of it.

Well, I took a lot of notes tonight - but it's getting late and many of my scribbles are like doctor's prescriptions - I can't read them.   I will say that Spot was very interested in the web metrics work and what can be measured and interested in having Electricsheep.org screensaver be available in more forms - that's as much as I can say now.

I think, at the very least, downloading the Electricsheep.org screensaver is a good thing to do.  I hope I gave a sense of the metrics and traffic this site is sitting on.  Scott Draves has an entry in Wikipedia where his entry is classified as an American and Digital Artist.

After two an a half hour dinner, the interview ended and I headed home to Brooklyn while Scott Draves took a train down to the West Village - where he had been before we met.