Masking

Let's try this out. These are a few masks that emerged recently from my sketchbook. The mask-drawing prrocess has lead down a few different thought paths. Most notably, after spending several hours drawing variations on these masks, and spending several days thereafter computing between-mask similarity scores for a style recognition model I've been pursuing, I started to notice masks just about everywhere. The feeling was subtle. But, I could see a mask when I closed my eyes. I could see masks hovering over people's faces on the bus. Occasionally, a momentary expression on a friend's face would immediately be replaced by one of my masks. All of these face-mask-substitution experiences were happening sometime in Feburary, 2006. Since then, I have used these masks in psychological tasks where participants rate the similarity between pairs of masks; these similarity scores are then compared against 'objective' measures of similarity derived from various multi-dimensional ways of parameterizing the entire set of masks. I've also created an algorithm that randomly splits the masks into smaller windows containing parts of the masks. Using this method I can create a very large set of mask-parts. It turns out that this large set of mask-parts can be used to reconstruct most digital pictures (kind of like a fourier analysis, only using parts of pictures). One last thing, while drawing these masks, it was interesting to think about the experience of boredom. At one point, probably on my 43rd mask, I approached the precipice of boredom, and was immediately intrigued by what my pen would have to draw next in order to maintain my fascination with the faint variations I was creating.