IkoStar

We were playing on the internets the other day and found this thing where you can average people’s faces.

You can make photos of what the imaginary offspring of 2, 3, 8, 30 of them would be if they all got together and there was a radical overhaul of the 1+1 style of sexual reproduction… and as the whole point of that, is to speed up the number of phenotypic possibilities that can be thrown at an environment…

… why not? It seems like a good idea so long as you fancied them enough and there wasn’t loads of emotional baggage, which I can well imagine, now you come to mention it… although I must say it is typical of you to bring that up again. Can’t you let it go? It was ages ago. I was drunk etc.

Anyway, the first thing you do is combine the good looking ones… and the offspring are really beautiful. Then you get bored with that and combine the slightly dodgy looking ones (yes yes, it’s all in the eye of the beholder), and the offspring of those are really beautiful as well. In fact no matter who you start with, you wind up with beautiful offspring.

Then (obviously) you breed everyone with everyone, and what you wind up with is this:

The offspring of the Mathematical Adam and Eve.

which reminds me of some sort of beatific Buddhist icon… soft focus, almost to the point of translucence and with eyes that are somehow far away, but also very direct and engaging… and intelligent. How do they do that? How does averaging the eyes make them look intelligent? and compassionate?

After that I had a look at some of the archived ones that people have made, pratting about on their own etc.

Someone’s managed to upload their own photographs that they’ve got off the web. I haven’t figured out how to do that, but what they’ve obviously done is uploaded photos of their favourite movie stars, these ones:

(Which are too big to all fit on one line, which is annoying, and they’re not the exact ones that have been used in the morph/merges above, apart from the blonde one if she’d had her mouth closed. Anyway, I don’t have time to spend all day trawling round the internet looking for pictures of attractive looking women. I’m busy. Very busy indeed.)

Still, whatever… if you look back up at the little pictures again, you can see that basically what they’re trying to do, is trialingly-and-erroringly get them to interbreed to produce the perfect woman, which is a bit eugenicist of them if you ask me, but is harmless enough unless you’re a staunch feminist and anyway….

… all I can think of is that I can kindof recognise the pictures, and the motivation, and that what they’re doing with their amateurish mouse-clickery, is groping in the dark towards Aphrodite.

Or Ishtar or Isis etc etc. Holy of Holies and irony of ironies that although man is made in God’s image, the first thing he trys when he gets to do a little intelligent design of his own, is to recreate a pagan goddess.

And I can’t really blame him for that, although to be fair, I think I like the original movie stars most… which is lucky for me, because they’re real, and would probably be available once they got to know me better etc *

Anyway, never mind about that. I made thing thing which is a bit like an averaging machine, but instead of getting an average, you get all of the peeps in quick succession.

This can take a while to load actually - if it’s a bit jerky and irregular, go away and make a cup of tea or something.

If you mouseover it, there’s a pause button.

Which I suggest you click, or you’ll go mad, quite quickly…. and if you’re going to go mad… I’m not saying you are for definate, but hypothetically, if you are going to go mad, there’s probably more interesting ways of doing it.

Go on. Stop it. You’ll have to or you’ll go bonkers

This one’s pretty cool… if you stare it if for a minute or so, you become totally hypnotized and start doing that magic-eye thing whether you like it or not.

Who am I kidding? Aphrodite?… it was always you, it was always you, it was always you.