link below to a story about the confused governmental approach to the sale of magic mushrooms. it would stand to reason that if customs and excise have been collecting VAT for these things - which they have - then their sale must be legal. or maybe not. actually i remember that in my youth it was considered unethical to sell mushrooms, because they just grew, maaaaan. now i think if you can make a living out of them, good luck. sort of...or maybe it would be good to see the owners of these shops get screwed over, just for being wannabe bohemian capitalists, maaaaan. i dunno. http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1373088,00.html

but anyway, no one has proved that there is any reason for the dried shrooms to be a class A. i'm certainly not saying that they're 100% safe (well, what is?), but they are not lethal, or even very dangerous. it's possible to have a pretty bad time on them, i know from my own experience; but it's possible to have a pretty bad time with over the counter flu remedy, which i also know from experience. as hallucinogens go, they are pretty mild. i suppose it depends how many you take, but at the prices that i've seen charged at those shops i'd say that you get better value from acid.

http://www.faceoftomorrow.com/home.asp another composite portrait site. so this one is a project to create composite "faces of cities". statistical faces, again. they all look sanitised, barbie-and -ken versions (and all young) of whatever the dominant ethnicity of the city happens to be. the artist, the tautological mike mike admits that these images are defined by the sites he chose to find his subjects. in istanbul, he couldn't find a single female who would be photographed, so culture intrudes on what was a well meaning humanist project, and rather undermines it. this, and nancy burson's work, seem to be an attempt to subvert galton's intentions with this technique, which is laudable, by going for a benign, generic, vagueness. what this really offers though, is equally vague. to fall back from complexity into pointing out that we all have two eyes, nose and mouth, is anodyne. class, gender, and culture are ignored. what we have is a picture of the global consumer, vacuous as one of those multiracial benneton ads from the 80's/90s, where everyone is united by their shared love of colourful knitwear. in london, he staked out the tate modern for his portraits. this, he admits himself is not representative; but i don't know where in london, fractured as it is, he could find a statistical cross section. 

i suppose this has as much to do with the medium of photography as anything else. a photograph is a photograph first and foremost, before it is anything else. it is the dominant media still, so it makes sense to imagine ourselves in these terms. image before meat.

mike mike also offers to make you a composite that will show what your potential future child will look like. all for 15$.

these are links for the thermals, an outstanding punk band who i've just discovered, but have been around for a little while now. they play their three chords in the right order, but the songs are really held together by their singer, hutch harris, and his (loosely speaking) melodic and rythmic sense. leads to something that sounds vaguely reminiscent of the pixies, but looser and more angry. lots of feedback, but done with a sense of it's musical possibilities. oh, and very good allusive lyrics too, that strangely you can hear pretty much every word of.

http://www.xfm.co.uk/Article.asp?id=12213 click on the link to see/hear them live (though they really aren't that much to look at). mink lung, on the same page, are worth checking out too. 

http://www.subpop.com/scripts/main/bands_page.php?id=410 biog, mp3s, and videos here.

below is a composite of galton himself. it is made of every suitable image (photographic image that is) of him that i could find on galton.org . there were paintings of him, but i decided that it had to be photography. i'm surprised that he didn't do this himself, but maybe he did, and it just wasn't in the website, but i'm sure it would have found it's way there if it existed. i would also be surprised if no one else has done it, in fact i'm sure someone somewhre must have.

so the images range from the mid 19th century, when he was in his 20s, to the first decade of the 20th, in his eighties.

"...another use of this process is to obtain a really good likeness of a living person. The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient.......The analytical tendency of the mind is so strong that out of any tangle of superimposed outlines it persists in dwelling preferably on some one of them, singling it out and taking little heed of the rest. On one occasion it will select one outline, on another a different one. Looking at the patterns of the papered walls of our room we see, whenever our fancy is active, all kinds of forms and features: we often catch some strange combination which we are unable to recall on a subsequent occasion, while later still it may suddenly flash full upon us. A composite portrait would have much of this suggestiveness."

rereading this, i feel that maybe i have misrepresented galton's view of this in my previous post. he is not so dogmatic about it being the true face, though he says that it should be a "good likeness". i think that he is much more subtle about this than i first thought. he talks about "strange combinations" and "suggestiveness". i certainly see the strange combination bit. the remains of each of the successive backgrounds and other details, like differing collars ties and whiskers, hang around the face like a smoky ectoplasm. literally other times, and time, made present. the face surfaces out of this, i was going to say like a rock on the seashore, but then i thought that it's maybe not so substantial or pre-existent as that. the face congeals, maybe, through the thickening of these times. but it remains an image, it is not a person, but an accretion of images.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it was galton's contention that the composite represented a particular truth. for example, the composite of napoleon below, made up of different medals or coins from his reign, was to be a truer picture of the essential napoleon than any of the components. he contended that if we were to take all the photographs, or paintings i suppose, of someone over their lifetime, and combine them, this would give this person's true face. i think that this shows remarkable faith in photography as a truthful and objective record; which is not very surprising as that was the norm at the time. its an interesting idea, nonetheless. if i wasn't so badly documented in that (and most) ways i would try it on myself. i have the feeling, however, that the result would be simply another photograph. my feeling is that photographic portraits resemble other photographic portraits far more than they resemble their subjects. the photograph-world is a parralell reality, not a picture of this one.

this one is all the members of the loathsome girls aloud, promiscuously combined with the members of the equally loathsome boy band blue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sulky, androgynous, airbrushed and very very young. i'm inclined to think that maybe it's as much an image of their constituency - in terms of youth, anyway. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the above is a few examples of his pictures of murderers.

below is one of galton's composites, made from a series of napoleonic coins from various places. this is the statistical mean of all those different representation of napoleon. galton seems to be implying that this could be napoleon's true face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the image above is a combination of jordan, peter andre, gareth gates, and will young. (seems to be mainly jordan though)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the black and white image above is another version of the ones posted previously. it seems to have saved for web use better than the first, but i don't know why, they are both made of the same material. i found adverts for dentistry and plastic surgery had the most suitable faces, as in direct, frontal to the camera, with little extraneous background.

it's hardly an original idea: http://www.nancyburson.com/ burson recycles galton's (the inventor of the technique) discovery. Galton, a eugenicist, thought that he could isolate particular criminal characteristics, that he thought were class specific, by making composite images of murderers. he found, (and this is burson's rather bland and didactic take on it, and what she seeks to demonstrate):"the special villainous irregularities ...have disapeared and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed. They represent not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime." in other words, anyone, no one.

this is his description of the discovery

"It is a composite.....Those of its outlines are sharpest and drakest that are common to the largest number of the components: the purely individual peculiarities leave little or no visible trace. The latter being necessarily disposed equally on both sides of the average, the outline of the composite is the average of all the components. It is a band, and not a fine line, because the outlines of the components are seldom exactly superimposed. The band will be darkest in its middle whenever the component portraits have the same general type of features, and its breadth or amount of blur will measure the tendency of the components to deviate from the common type...the result being that the composite represents an averaged figure, whose lineaments have been softly drawn."

what is represented is a statistical face. he used this technique to try and isolate racial characteristics, and family characteristics; one of his biggest interests was, after all eugenics, though in that period he was certainly not alone in that. it was a brilliant inspiration to see all this as a way of extracting meaning from the data. the blur etc. represented the contour lines that mapped the average, or archetypal, no matter how mad or meaningless the project might seem now. i find it telling that he emphasises the outline, for his statistical reasons. i read somewhere else (i'll post a link if i can find it again) that he reputedly thought silhouettes were the best likenesses. i think silhouettes, or outline drawings of any kind are the least representative of our lived experience,and closest to abstraction, being as nothing has an outline. i can see why he would like them.

but maybe that is unfair, another way of reading his interpretation of the blur is as probability. where the blur is thickest, is where the edge is most likely to be found. this is the edge of something -an essence, that like all essences- that doesn't exist. though i think that reading is probably anachronistic. he himself said that "the ideal faces obtained by the method of composite portraiture appear to have a great deal in common with....so-called abstract ideas" (i stole this quoute fromhttp://www.manovich.net/EV/ev.pdf a paper by Lev Manovich on the construction of vision, which i have read very badly, just to fillet it for stuff on galton. seems to me it's well worth a look though.)

http://www.mugu.com/galton/essays/1870-1879/galton-1878-nature-composite.pdf for a full facsimile of the original paper by galton

http://www.mugu.com/galton/index.html for the galton homepage and archives, which are huge.

it always amazes me how we recognise anyone. it's a common enough experience to arrange to meet somewhere, say outside holborn tube station. within five minutes of waiting, thousands of faces will have streamed past, all more or less the same. there will be variations in hair or skin colour; but almost all will have the requisite number of eyes, nostrils etc. more or less in the right order. and yet we can pick the person we are waiting for out of these thousands, as they can pick us. i'm always more suprised by a failure to recognise someone than the act of recognition itself, which is the wrong way round.