The idea

At the time the assignment was handed out, I was freelancing on a logo depicting a horse skeleton. During research I was fascinated with how it was connected, so I started to boil it down (on Post-It notes, no less) to a set of parameters and coordinates I could use to generate random skeletons.

The shoulder blade is the starting point, from which various positions of the cranium, pelvis and the front leg are offset. By connecting curves from the shoulder blade to the cranium and pelvis, the neck and spine is made, onto which a random number of vertebrae are assigned. From the pelvis the tip of the tail and the hind leg can be offset. When all anchor points are in place, more lines, curves and primitive shapes are drawn to resemble a complete skeleton.

The initial plan was to connect vectorised, pre-made bones and crania, but my teacher Mosse (who has a certain knack of turning ones ideas upside-down) liked the primitive shapes from the early sketches and convinced me to keep it that way. In a way it ends up underlining the fact that these creatures are just results of mathematical formulas. They seem to resemble real animals in an odd fashion - a strange digital zoo compared to the comical “Frankenstein’s monsters” I first had in mind.

In motion