Some cool pictures of celebrities images:
Tricia as West-Asian- using The Face Transfomer
Image by Tricia Wang 王圣捷
watch epic fu's great episode on The Face Transfomer
you can do your own face at their site at The Face Transfomer.
Beyond thinking that the face transformer is cool, I started thinking about the social meaning behind this exercise.
Here I am pretending to be a a “afro-carriabean” - wtf? I mean cool yes, I want to see what I look like as a manga character and am curious to see what I look like as a black person - but there was something odd about trying on different races.
What does it mean for race relations and conceptions when we feel that we can freely try on different races?
I am always really sensitive when people verbally say that a person acts like a certain race. It’s almost akin to imaginatively being another race - kinda like with face transformer. And you know I actually hear it most often among my white and black friends or my white and latino friends. I’ve heard a black person say to a white person, “you know so much about black culture that you are really black or at least must have been black in a past life.” Now I find that on one end to be a compliment, that the white person is accepted as part of the black community, but on the other end I find it difficult to swallow as a form of compliment because only white people are given the latitude to pretend to be another race or ethnicity. For dominant groups, like Caucasians in the states, race can be an after thought so it’s almost like a novelty to pretend for a moment that one is another race or ethnicity. For people who look anything other than white in Western countries, there isn’t as much freedom to forget one’s skin color because they are reminded of it (usually negatively) in their daily interactions. And you don’t usually hear the reverse, that a white person will say to a black person, “wow you know so much about black culture that you are actually white!”
For non-whites, being a certain race or ethnicity can be a complicated process of accepting one’s skin color and the popular conceptions of one’s race or ethnic group. A lot of times, this entails the imagination of being white before a full embracement of one’s race. For a time period when I was a teenager raised in an all white community, I wished I was white so badly so that I didn’t’ have to deal with being looked down upon with racist jaunts by my classmates. And so here I am, trying on a west-indian face – now should I really imagine what it is like to look like an indian female?
In addition, it’s usually people who are more affluent who have the opportunity to learn about another culture and to transplant themselves into another ethnic group’s cultural world - so comments like “wow you know so much about my culture, you must be mexican” just make me uncomfortable because there’s a certain level of privilege that comes with learning about another “culture.” The fact that I make time and spend money to learn spanish because I find the language beautiful and useful is a privilege – of course one that I embrace and am not embarrassed of, but at the same time I am quite aware of my social position to even be able to learn another language more out of interest and less out of need.
So back to face transformer – does this mean america is comfortable with race (and manga, chimps and euro painters) if we can freely try on different races? And what does this say about race when we can collapse large groups of people together into general categories? In Face Transformers all the blacks and africans are grouped into the afro-carridean category, and all asians are collapsed into the east-asian category. this is an odd form of racial reductionism. And where are the latinos – where do they fit in this?
I’ve always kept a tab on these face transformer-like sites and I think the fun in trying these online sites out is an expression of an underlying desire to temporarily imagine another physical body without fully committing to that body/face. And the kinds of changes rendered by these online sites point to a greater cultural obsession or let’s say anxiety with that rendering. So for Face Transfomers we could say this is an obsession with race and euro paintings:) oh and with age also – you can chose to be a young adult, baby, teenager and old person.
One of the predecessors to Face Transformers was My Heritage and I wrote about the social meaning behind that too 2 years ago when it launched. So instead of transforming into a race or chimp like Face Transformer, you can transform yourself to a celebrity and see which one you most closely resemble. So this points to an obsession with celebrities.
Ok that’s it after my social diagnosis I think I will upload another picture on Face Transformer and see what I look like as a Male. Hmmm perhaps I have an underlying anxiety with switching genders?
Kim Woodward and Samantha Fox
Image by fluterirl
I did not recognise either of these two actresses and i said to a gentleman with them who turned out to be Kim's husband. He brought me into the hotel lobby and Kim signed and posed for a picture she then called over Samantha Fox who was with her. They were both very nice.
Madame Tussauds 03-03-2004
Image by Karen Roe
Millions and millions of people have flocked through the doors of Madame Tussauds since they first opened over 200 years ago and it remains just as popular as it ever was. There are many reasons for this enduring success, but at the heart of it all is good, old-fashioned curiosity. Today’s visitors are sent on a unique, emotionally-charged journey through the realms of the powerful and famous. The museum-style ropes and poles have gone so guests can truly get up, close and personal with A-list celebrities, sporting legends, political heavyweights and historical icons, reliving the times, events and moments that made the world talk about them...
The attraction’s history is a rich and fascinating one, with roots dating back to the Paris of 1770. It was here that Madame Tussaud learnt to model wax likenesses under the tutelage of her mentor, Dr Philippe Curtius. At the age of 17, she became art tutor to King Louis XVI’s sister at the Palace Of Versailles and then, during the French Revolution, was hastily forced to prove her allegiance to the feudalistic nobles by making the death masks of executed aristocrats. Madame Tussaud came to Britain in the early 19th century alongside a travelling exhibition of revolutionary relics and effigies of public heroes and rogues.
