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.

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

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.

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.

I took this photo last fall and it’s been the inspiration for my next set of experiments here. I plan on exploring the color palette and makeup of these walnuts. I’ll probably use a mix of generative art w/ ActionScript and possibly some watercolor or silkscreen prints down the road. I’m doing this because I’m inspired by systems that exist in nature. The breakdown of these walnuts are part of natures plan, much like how seeds grow and flowers bloom.

There are mathematical patterns in nature. Each seed is designed the same. Yet there are random elements that allow them all to look different. The forces in nature play within a set amount of rules, but the variables make each of these walnuts unique. In my opinion this is largely what creates beauty in nature.

The first experiment will be pretty simple and have to do w/ circles of varying size and color that will emulate the layers of these walnuts. Also, I’m kind of just using the walnuts as a starting point, who knows where I’ll end up.

The analog process was fun and the whole reason for this exercise. The warm sound and big cables were fun to mess around with. I could’ve achieved the same result w/ my audio editing program on my mac and my computer mic, but I wanted to see how the analog process was different from what I’m used to.

It’s important to mention the difference between sampling and constant drag. Digital sampling is how I, and most of the world, enjoy music these days. It’s kind of works like frames in an animation. Small bursts of sound are emitted with silence in-between. This creates a perceived constant sound, like an animation is actually a set of stills that is perceived as motion (maybe not a totally accurate analogy, but it will work for now).Analog sound on the other hand (like a cassettee or vinyl record) is created by the constant drag of a needle over surface. If you slow down a record, your music might start to sound like satan, but you may also notice that the signal is still nice and thick. If you tried to slow down a digital track, the spaces in between the sound would become more apparent the perceived constant sound starts to break down quickly.

I read recently that music is actually recorded specifically for the ipodders of the world. Music today sounds much more tinny, high-pitched and thin than the stuff our parents grew up listening to. From The Daily Cardinal;

Apparently music … is now often being recorded, mixed and mastered to sound ideal specifically on earbuds as opposed to being aimed at more conventional sound systems. In a twisted way, innovation seems to be actually reaching for the lowest common denominator these days.

Eventually I had to bastardize my ….ahem….. vision and digitize this file for you to listen to over the internet.

Now some damage control for any audiophiles that come across this post; I don’t claim to be an audio expert, and I may not be correctly describing a lot of the technical details of analog vs. digital. This experiment was just an exercise for a guy who lives, eats, breathes, digital media.

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.