Please don't let the "long" stop you. If you are a geek who has ever enjoyed genetic algorithms and would like to see some details about using them for artistic gain (and some of the art), you will like this.

Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a software artist residing in San Francisco. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona.

Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms known as sheep. The votes of the users form the basis for the fitness function for a genetic algorithm on a space of abstract animations. Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool.