Cousins

A system for making lots of interesting, similar things. But not too similar.

Linguistics!?

Cousins is an investigation of shape grammars which are related to the study of language. The concept has been around since at least the 1970s.

I decided to use shape grammars to make characters. Each scene is like a sentence. In English that means a subject, object and verb. Verbs might have modifiers, nouns might come with adjectives, etc. In Cousins a scene-sentence has a background, characters, and colors. Characters have heads, which in turn have features. Mouths might get gold teeth; ears might get earrings.

NFT profile picture collections like the Bored Apes Yacht Club are a famous example of a similar concept. Bored Apes mix and match traits but as far as I know there are no traits within traits. That’s where Cousins is different!

Why It’s Made

I’m certain Mad Libs were a big influence. If you’re unfamiliar, Mad Libs is a literary game (pass time?). The participants answer prompts like “an adjective” or “a celebrity’s last name.” The prompts are then used to fill in a pre-composed story. Since the participants don’t know the story when they are answering the prompts, the results are often hilarious and feel personal to the people that generated them.

Cousins captures this by allowing me to mix and match little pieces of the art. I sculpted various heads, noses and hair and Cousins assembles them according to the rules of the grammar.

Once all the pieces are in place it’s delightful to hit go and look for the combinations of pieces and colors that I would never have otherwise investigated myself.

Gallery