Electric Sheep

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

The casual user can simply install the software as a screensaver. Alternatively, the user may become more involved with the project, manually creating a fractal flame file for upload to the server. It is than rendered into a video file of the animated fractal flame. As the screensaver entertains the user, their computer is also used for rendering commercial projects, sales of which keep the servers and developers running.
The Name "Electric Sheep" comes from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Andriod's Dream of Electric Sheep? 
The idea is that the computers (androids) run screen savers when not in use rendering "dreams," the fractal movies (sheep).

The parameters that generate these movies (sheep) can be created in a few ways:
They can be created and submitted by members of the electric sheep mailing list, members of the mailing list can download the parameters and tweak them
Or sheep can be mated together automatically by the server or manually
Users may vote on sheep that they like or dislike, and this voting is used for the genetic algorithm which generates new sheep.
 Each movie is a fractal Flame with several of its parameters animated. 

Source: http://www.techasart.org/Artists.html