This was a similar experience to the relationship I now have with the American Buffalo. The book changed my perception of the Bison just like Graceland changed my perception of Elvis.

This gets to my original intent of this whole project:

If my perception of the Bison was open, why can’t I help define what it is? (If only for myself) If my mental model of the bison is no longer the James Earle Fraser version, what does it look like for me?

MY version of the bison is something that is beautiful, tragic, ghost-like, and complex. So I began to experiment with building images that matched that;

1. Faux Fur

I started with a series of sketches that looked like this.

Using found images of Bison I built faux fur and pulled pixel information from the images to create a recreation made entirely of fur.

The fur sketches had a nice ghost-like quality to them. I then moved away from the fur and focused on trying to replicate the coin. That led me to thinking about laser-cutting…

2. Actual Nickels — Laser-Cut Silhouettes 

This is a concept that I fooled around with for a short while. I wanted to create an actual coin…dynamic bison silhouettes laser cut from steel. I sliced up torsos, behinds, feet and heads of buffalo images to randomly create a franken-bison shape. It would have been a real nickel you could hold in your hand!! I abandoned this one because it was really difficult to get the seams to match up for all the different body parts.

3. Infographic (sort of)

My next (and hopefully final) attempt is to build an image that is controlled by data that relates to the Bison. I’ve collected data of herd populations in Yellowstone as well as the value of the Buffalo Nickel coin. The information drives the output in a way that becomes a kind of incomprehensible data visualization.

But more about that in the next post when we talk about inspiration and the dos and don’ts of data visualization.

The book got me thinking about the symbol of the American Bison. The bison has a complex and tragic back story that most Americans are familiar with; They once roamed the plains in great numbers, but were driven to near extinction by mass killings during westward expansion. We also know some Native American tribes had a special connection with the creature.

The Bison has developed into an icon that represents early, unsettled America…a ghost of the plains.

Specifically, two things stuck with me after reading this book;

1. Bison are big dumb animals — This rich symbol of early America is one dumb-ass animal. They are fast and strong, but NOT smart. Bison would slide off cliffs into the Mississippi like lemmings. It would not be uncommon to see their drowned carcasses floating down the river.
2. The model for the nickel was a tortured zoo animal — “Black Diamond” lived under tortuous conditions at the Central Park Zoo in New York and is considered by many to be the model for the bison nickel. This animal stood for hours in a cramped cage and developed an unnatural posture because of it. The animal which was supposed to represent the idea of wide open spaces and hope for the future, actually lived a caged and miserable life.

Those two things stuck in my mind. Was the bison really this majestic iconic animal? Or was it really just a big dumb animal destined for extinction? The symbol of this animal is important to our history. But it’s not what I thought. Maybe I can create my own symbol of what the animal is?

I’ll leave you with a quote from the designer of the coin;

I felt I wanted to do something totally American—a coin that could not be mistaken for any other country’s coin. It occurred to me that the buffalo, as part of our western background, was 100% American
— James Earle Fraser, The designer of the coin in a 1947 radio interview.

Next time we’ll talk about artistic inspiration and generative code.

Before I walked away he said,

“What’s up with all the Bison stuff? I don’t get it. Is it a design thing?”

To which I replied,

“Yes… A design thing… Um, It’s hard to explain.”

And that was the end of it. This has come up several times and I’ve always struggled to explain in person this “thing” that I’m working on. So… let’s me try to explain why I’ve been piddling around with Bison pictures on and off for the last year.

I’ve been a little reluctant to share some of my thoughts out here in the open. This is the internet ya know? You can’t just go sharing all your half baked ideas with the whole world, can you?!  What if they all point and laugh at me?

In the next couple posts I will go over my intent and inspiration for this project, and hopefully post the final series of rendered images so I can move on with my life, or at least the next wacky thing I have planned:)

The image is part of a template I created when saving out some low res files… I thought it looked kinda interesting. Hopefully more to share soon.

A template for saving out images for my project

From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

I’ve got some other projects in a similar vein that I will be trying out. They will all have a nature/animal theme, and they will be built with hand drawn elements positioned by code.

The twigs are all positioned and sized w/ code. The eggs shape was made by hand, but positioned w/ code. In the future I plan to further randomize the shape, color and characteristic of each twig.

Behold, my very first generative comp. The image of a neon hot pink, scribbled, slightly-rotated square popped into my head one day. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Justice. Made w/ Actionscript 3 and the Bezier curve fitting function built into Tweener.

Fit my curve!

In the same masochistic way I let a ping-pong sorting algorithim rule my life, I’ve been obsessing on how to draw elegant fluid curves in AS3 via Flash’s drawing API. This mostly started from being inspired by Erik Natzke’s work.

I started with the Flash drawing APIs generic “CurveTo” method, but it left “kink”s in the curves that passed through more than 2 points. Then I played with AS3′s built-in “BezierSegment” in the fl.motion package which produces a cubic bezier, which are similar to the curves in Illustrator.

I scoured the interwebs for the best curve fitting functions. Dug through old presentations of Rober Penner, The Father of Curves in Flash. Most of the math is way over my head but I did come across a few interesting ones:

• http://mike.teczno.com/notes/splines.html (AS2);
• http://www.paultondeur.com/2008/03/09/drawing-a-cubic-bezier-curve-using-actionscript-3/
• http://erikloyer.com/index.php/blog/cardinal_splines_in_actionscript/

These helped me better understand the differnt kinds of curves but ultimately what I wanted was a nice bezier curve fitting function. I wanted to say, “Here are 20 points, class. Now plot me a beautiful bezier curve based on them!”… And it was right under my nose the whole time. Tweener, which I use every day, has a built in Bezier curve fitting function that I somehow overlooked. Yowza!

In typical jacobmake fashion, I’ve spent an exuberent amount of time researching process without a pixel to show for it. Hopefully, I be able to present some rough generative sketches soon now that I’ve licked this curve addiction.