Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Faces have been changed to protect the innocent...and the guilty.

 In a moment of almost-synchrony, last the August 12 editions of the NY Post and The Epoch Times (a newspaper published by the falun gong and given away free on the northern exit of Grand Central) both included images of pixelated faces to illustrate items in their pages.  The instance in the Epoch Times' front page that day was particularly arresting.  Seemingly crafted as a design project, the pixel colors are very harmonous - not to mention weirdly large for the scale of the face they are obscuring.  It works for me as a representational/abstract mashup.  The Post's incarnation is less aesthetically dynamic, but the rarity of seeing the tool used twice in one day was enough for me to clip it out.  It does take me back to a childhood memory - that of the fembots from the Bionic Woman (and the Six-Million Dollar Man).  The image below lends a pretty good likeness to the Post's use of pixelation. 
Fembot.  via bionic.wikia.com
This fembot in the form of Oscar Goldman is particularly creepy...an intriguing piece of sculpture.
A male fembot(?)  Is that even possible?  via bionic.wikia.com


As it happens, Angelika engaged in a bit of frontpage pixelation herself, mindlessly moving melon seeds around in the kitchen.  (Her photo of it is much nicer than mine.)  In this case, she livened up an illustration of a rather bland painting by an artist showing at bau this month.

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