A long long time ago, a web site called
YTMND had a meme involving
people whose facial expressions seemingly never change. But this meme has an unusual origin. Back in 2005, a SomethingAwful user received a series of flirtatious IMs from a person he'd never talked to before. The photos "she" sent him were used for
the original meme – but there was no proof that they belonged to the IMer. Over the course of two weeks and 63 pages, forum users collaborated to figure out
just what the hell was going on – and the story, as it unfolds in real time, is twistier and more unexpected than real life usually ends up being.
[use the MAJOR UPDATE PAGES at the top of the thread to navigate; search for "The Pitbull" to jump to updates from the OP]
posted by Rory Marinich
on Mar 27, 2013 -
45 comments
A Family Affair by celebrated Dutch makeup artist Ellis Faas. Her brother is the model and her daughter created the music. Faas says, "As a late teenager, I visited the Tate Gallery in London and was blown away by a Francis Bacon triptych. It made a great impression on me because of the use of colour - it was unnerving and stunningly beautiful at the same time.
Bacon inspired many experiments I did over the years."
(via The FaceCulturalist)
posted by madamjujujive
on Jan 15, 2013 -
7 comments
12-year-old uses Dungeons & Dragons to help scientist dad with his research: Cognitive scientist Alan Kingstone wanted to test whether people look at each others' eyes or simply to the center of faces. Some had suggested an answer would be impossible to discern because humans' eyes are in the center of their faces. But Alan’s son, Julian, a fan of D&D, told his father about D&D monster characters that have eyes in unusual places, such as on their hands or tail. “[Julian suggested] if you just showed them these images, you could find out whether they are looking for the eyes or not. I thought, actually, that’s a very good idea,” Kingstone said (
summarized from Cosmos). The paper describing the results - "
Monsters are people too" - was published in the British Royal Society journal
Biology Letters this month, with 14-year-old Julian named as the lead author.
posted by flex
on Nov 1, 2012 -
42 comments
This weekend, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will induct
the Small Faces and the Faces. Though being inducted as a unit, they were very much two distinct bands—both of them central to British rock of the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, and whose influence on music, fashion, and pop culture is still felt today.
[more inside]
posted by scody
on Apr 11, 2012 -
37 comments
"
Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer, who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, infancy and creativity." Here are a collection of
Bruno Munari's Faces. You can see more of the maestro's work in this short documentary:
1,
2,
3, and on this Italian
children's show from the 1970s. And here are scans from some of Munari's famous
illustrations for children's books.
posted by puny human
on Apr 19, 2011 -
5 comments
Few phenomena have the power to confound as many different types of people as
pareidolia. It doesn't discriminate by culture or religion. It causes Christians to see
Jesus and Mary, Muslims to see
the names of Allah and the Prophet, Jews to see
the Star of David, Hindus to see
the monkey-god Hanuman, and Buddhists to see — you guessed it —
the Buddha. Even atheists who haven't devoted themselves to skepticism have puzzled long and hard over the famous
face, and more recently,
Bigfoot, on Mars. Now video has surfaced on YouTube of pseudoscientist and perennial attention-seeker Richard Heene (yes,
Balloon Boy's dad)
seeing things on the red planet too. If you'd prefer the filler edited out, the
remix is highly entertaining.
[more inside]
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis
on Aug 11, 2010 -
20 comments
Why We Stare, Even When We Don’t Want To “When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that,” Rosenberg said. “All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. ‘Are they one of us or not?’ In other species, when an animal looks very different, they get rejected.” The article is about why humans stare at disfigurements, but it may say something about why we stare at anyone who seems different. Previously:
Seeing race: the Other-Race Effect.
posted by shetterly
on Jun 22, 2009 -
39 comments
Graffiti Project in Kenya Slums — more than a year after he took the original pictures, French photo artist JR has returned to Kibera, Kenya. He was reunited with the women who had accepted to be part of his WOMEN project at the end of 2007 (
previously). 2000 square meters of Kibera slum rooftops have been covered with photos of their eyes and faces. Most of the women will have their own photos on their own rooftop and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. They are on view from the railway line that passes above them, and will be visible for Google Earth. (via
Africa.Visual_Media)
posted by netbros
on Apr 8, 2009 -
11 comments
A Thousand Faces Photographer Hal Satterthwaite photographed a thousand people in Walthamstow, which is in north-east London. It's a multi-racial, multi-cultural area, and the photographs reflect this beautifully.
Related article from The Times.
I had intended to link to various pictures, but for me the delight was finding the faces I liked best by browsing the site. I even found a friend in there.
posted by essexjan
on Aug 2, 2006 -
15 comments
St. Andrew's Face Morpher lets you upload a photo, and then morphs that photo so the person looks more caucasian, or afro-caribean, or older, or younger. Or drunk. Or like the person is 1/2 monkey. (Many more options available.)
posted by 23skidoo
on Jan 10, 2005 -
23 comments
fun with faces. using applets,
ken perlin built an interactive facial-expression thingy.
i found this site because ken is responsible for the cute lil heart animation at google. there are quite a few interesting thingamabobs to check out at his site.
posted by acridrabbit
on Feb 14, 2001 -
4 comments
LifeFX This company claims to have made 3D models of faces that are indistinguishable from the real thing. If I didn't know before hand, the few
examples they show would have fooled me.
posted by Nyarlathotep
on Aug 11, 2000 -
1 comment
