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

If you don’t wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do ‘em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you’ll get to later.

Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themselves of how perfectly that idea should be executed. And they imagine it on a beautiful platter with glitter and rose petals. And everyone’s clapping for them. But the, but the, but the, but the bummer is most ideas kinda suck when you do ‘em. And no matter how much you plan you still have to do something for the first time. And you’re almost guaranteed the first time you do something it’ll blow. But somebody who does something bad three times still has three times the experience of that other person who’s still dreaming of all the applause.

Kinda what I started out fighting with jacobmake, but lately I’ve been high on brain crack. Watch the video here.

So, how does someone have the commitment to create a masterpiece? You would have to be an expert in your medium, and have the longevity to work on something (and like it) for an extended period of time. It’s easy to struggle with commitment when working on projects. There are so many reasons to quit. Good ideas are hard enough to find. Most, when realized are less impressive than when conceived. Others surprise you, and turn into something different than originally planned. I am in awe of people, like Harris, who are this committed to their work. It’s not easy to do something amazing, even if you are uber-talented.

Random Math + color, line & shape continue to be my muse. I aspire to create things like Robert Hodgin. Perhaps it’s time to return to what I know best. To switch drawing tools… to put down the pen or brush and return to the keyboard. My hope is that I won’t spend too much time waffling about medium.

Just a little while ago I made some comments about Chuck Close’s process. Since then I’ve revisited Joshua Davis’s site and downloaded his presentation from 07. For those that don’t know Joshua Davis, he is an artist that takes design elements and uses random math in Flash to position things, generating a thousand new compositions w/ each click of a button.

It was pretty ironic to see that Joshua pokes a fun at Chuck’s “process”. Davis uses Close’s work as a backdrop to some of his code samples. Davis finds kind of an interesting relationship between Close’s process and the his own process which includes a computer “processor”, that takes care of all the grunt work.

More than once I’ve vowed to return to analog means, but eventually I’d like jacobmake to develop a niche. The thing I’m most interested is generative art. Random math, shape and color appeal to me, especially the way Joshua Davis lays it out. In that 2007 presentation (which is basically just the slideshow from his actual presentation) he draws a line between himself and more “pure” programmatic generative artists like Casey Raes and the Processing gang.

I like the automation of Joshua Davis’s, but i’m missing the hands-on human element. Maybe i could find a mix, re-drawing computer generated art? Putting it through a human process? It would be a much slower version of how a computer can draw something, it would retain the human imperfections that live in Close’s work. Sounds like a pretty crack-head process I know.

Most NES games come with an NSF (Nintendo Sound File), that is next to impossible to convert w/out downloading 15 kinds of 3rd party software (most un-available on mac). But that won’t even work for me, because I trolled through the NSF file and couldn’t find the effect from the game I wanted. It’s really just a series of bloops and bleeps. My next attempt was trying to capture the sound while running the ROM. I haven’t found out how to capture sound “internally”, thus it goes through my speakers, back into the mic and kills the whole clean 8-bit synth effect. I’m spending waaay to much time on this little delve into 8-bit sound land, but hope to have something to show soon.

UPDATE: God Bless the $30 app maker. I found exactly what I needed.

After the TwitterFace project is complete, I’m thinking about going analog on the next project. I have recently obtained a high def camcorder and a table saw, both tools could allow for a new medium on JacobMake and I’m looking for projects that could incorporate them. (No I’m not going to saw up my camera.) Is it wrong to get inspired by the tool or process? I ran across an interesting quote by Chuck Close the other day that I found, well….uninsipiring;

Inspiration is for amatuers. I just get to work.

and

What I found that one of the nice things [about] working incrementally is that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single day. Today I did what I did. You can pick it up and put it down. I don’t have to wait for inspiration. There are no good days or bad days. Every day essentially builds positively on what I did the day before. … Given my nature, I believe it was very good for me to be able to add to what I already had and slowly construct the final image out of these little building blocks.

This raises a great question about process. Chuck managed to get past the blank canvas block by working incrementally. His process freed him of too much thought. I love Chuck’s work, but technically isn’t this kind of repetitive mechanical “work” more suited for craft?

World, meet Ella Grace Heberlie.

The purpose of this blog is to document my own creative process. In hindsight, I may have been driven to this effort due to a personal prenatal circumstance. Perhaps it was an attempt to hold on to my identity and my ability to think creatively before it gets washed away with minivans and dance recitals. Since the birth of my daughter I’ve found that all of these concerns were…..silly. If anything the experience has allowed me to feel very mortal (in a good way) and has given me the ability to appreciate and experience life in a whole new way.

As for the future, the birth of a child and a freelance flood has really taken it out of me. I will resume things here in the near future.