Face replacement needs

Vintage face depot provides the service you never knew you needed. “Servicing all your face replacement needs with our specially selected range of vintage faces.” See the face replacement progress on @facedepot’s timeline and more information from their salon page.

The bot has very specific needs and doesn’t really like non-human faces (so cats etc. don’t always work), but I was very pleased with the outcome of one of my photos:

Intense, no?

It is just splendid. That’s my face superimposed with that of THE LATE SIR P. N. RUSSELL (Sir Peter Nicol Russell). You can find out more about him on the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I like the oil painting ADB mentions at the University of Sydney (no permalink, search for Orchardson and you’ll find it). For one thing, Russell is looking in the opposite direction to most of the pictures of him on Trove. Even in his medal, he’s facing to the left.

The only scary element of the vintage face depot is whether we really know what it’s actually doing. Maybe the faces aren’t being superimposed, but that’s what lies beneath? The bot senses our inner moustache? I am lucky to have only just read The Picture of Dorian Gray, from much hassling by my better-read friend. At least I didn’t make any promises when I saw this photo of my sins.

There was a book in the art school library, Scratch, by Christian Boltanski (Verlag der Buchhandlung, Köln, 2002), which is well-described by Grahame Galleries. It was both magnificent and dreadful, because you had to scrape the silver surface (a film like surface, reminiscent of a scratch-it ticket). Only then would you see the actual content of the book, a secret layer of forbidden images. We only ever scratched it a little bit. The art library staff members were actually very encouraging – I think they would have liked to scratch the book too, and probably did this in secret. I never saw a full page. Perhaps it’s now totally revealed. Like the fact that I could really be Sir P. N. Russell.