Bird Curves

1972

Plotter Drawing

Description

Bird Curves captures William Kolomyjec’s early experiment in transforming a handmade drawing into a system, with code determining its path across the page.

Kolomyjec digitized a drawing of a goose, translating it into coordinates the computer could reproduce. Working in Fortran on a CDC6500 mainframe, he used a mathematical function written by Christopher Scussel to generate the curve. The program placed the figure at regular intervals, adjusting its size and orientation according to the slope at each point. He tested many curves before selecting this data set, balancing the randomness of the computer with his own artistic choices.

In Bird Curves, geese with outstretched wings move across the page in a looping path. Some are large and clearly recognizable, while others are reduced to small marks that almost dissolve into abstraction. A sense of order is created through the even spaces between each bird, and their shifting scale creates depth. The flock has no clear beginning or end, giving the work a feeling of continuous motion.

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