Loud Alien Noize did a feature on my Selfies From Alternate Universes series. Click on the pic or the link to check it out, and he’s got lots of other fascinating content about art, music, film, and culture.
Seriously folks, the public reaction to this series has been somewhere between milquetoast and viscous (and stupid) attacks. But, uh, Tobe Damit at Loud Alien Noise and a few other people whose opinions matter to me really dig it. Perhaps more people will catch on over time, and I should do more of these.
Selfies from Alternate Universes ”All of these digital paintings are based on my humble visage” says Eric Wayne. I been keeping an eye on him and when I saw the first samples of the ”Selfish-Selfies” as he had already called them, I knew he was onto something. Finally someone had found a way to make […]
via Eric Wayne — Loud Alien Noize
Note: I don’t recall every using the phrase “selfish selfies”, ’cause that has a rather negative connotation. Though I might have said “self-ish” (as in self-ish portraits, because they are not exactly self-portraits) which has a very different meaning.
~ Ends
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Wow. I read Loud Alien Noize. I’ve seen your selfies series multiple times. The YouTube sequence of it there made it even more powerful. I’ve started looking for a feature of physiognomy that remains consistent and is easy to spot across the wildly-differing-seeming images. The one I’ve seized on at the moment is the mouth. It’s fun to do and contributes to my enjoyment of the series. (I think you were quite right to point out the difference between “selfish” and “self-ish”!)
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Some of the ones I’m working with are more distant family members, so to speak. Others have a more uncanny likeness. Recently I’ve been working on my traditional portrait drawing skills so I can do a lot of the transitions without recourse to the AI, or better fix and incorporate the changes it makes. Most of what it creates are abominations, and it’s only the occasional one that I think has potential to become an image. The practice I’ve been doing will also enable me to make the resemblance more striking if I choose to.
If you don’t know this, there use to be an App made by the same people which would change race. However, it was SHUT DOWN by “social justice” warriors on the grounds that it was automatically “racist”. There was also an enormous anti-racist potential in the ability to see yourself as a member of another race, but they argued that some races appeared more attractive than others (apparently not realizing that the AI isn’t racist and doesn’t have a subjective opinion, and the procedure was likely rather clinical, in which case their conclusions, well, might reflect their own beliefs and biases about beauty and not those of the AI). I never have a chance to play with the app, because it was SHUT DOWN before I ever heard of it, so I have no way of testing what I think of how it actually performed. I gather the AI uses a combination of standardized calculations and reference images to create new likenesses.
Nevertheless, I’ve stumbled on ways to trick the truncated version of the app to create other racial varieties based on images of myself, and there are ways of manually doing it both with drawing and collage techniques. So, if I am making, for example, a female black version of myself, I am pushing the dissimilarity while trying to retain similarity. Sometimes a new person is created where the resemblance isn’t very strong, but it’s still there, and I’m more fascinated by the person created, who doesn’t exist in reality. So, I may include some of those.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
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