Document:Q11137

In the simplest means I have endeavored to create a lively, interactive palette whereby you can express yourself.
Personally, the human face is the single most intriguing image I can place on my retinas, closely followed, and of course sometimes exchanged for, the image of the human form...and we each have our preferences here. Without a doubt, we are hardwired so...as a crow for another crow.
What amazes me is how endlessly fascinating what seems to be an almost endless number of facial types and the facial expressions which can flash across...all this from just changing a few of the parts here and there...a corner of the mouth, the flare of the nostrils, the angle of the ears, the flow of the nose, the texture of the skin, and so on. Who has not seen in another, often familiar, face...let alone your own , either frozen like a zombie or animated as if you had a glowplug stuck up...that appears soft, lovely, full of warmth, beauty and love in one frame, only to transform into a conniving, greedy swine in another.
Yes, indeed, the neural net behind the retina that perceives the facial image comes into question, yet it is the endless variations on these handful of facial elements which is transmitting them...with its own neural net partially at the controls...that holds my fascination.
Again, Nature gives us a vast terrain of incredible richness constructed out of a few elements given slight variations and endless combinations. And now we come to the essence of this journey...the parts to the whole.
The parts to the whole...it is what drives our science, is fundamental to the arts, and often given to faith elsewhere. In our quest to understand it all...the whole universe(s)...all of life...the human body...the genome within...we are by design and without other recourse examining, studying, manipulating, cloning and exchanging the parts. It's all about the parts. It's really all about the whole, but all the talk and efforts are about the parts. It's one big swapmeet.
Swapping parts out on your computer is one thing, swapping out DNA sequences in your body...let alone your food...is a lot more exciting. Remember the whole. The parts serve the whole. Trouble signs appears when the opposite rules.
If modernism was a return to first principles ("art for art's sake"), post-modernism was not just a reaction to or a new branch from the old classical tree, but really a new seedling altogether. It anticipated and marked the beginning of a new age of discovery. What happens when you place or exchange new parts...often similar, but more often not...with the old? Do you get a new whole? A new view of the old whole? Is the unity of Nature inviolate...or is it much, much wider than our own limitations have imagined? Should limited imaginations constrain?
That seedling is growing into a full-fledged trunk (post-post-modernism or some other -ism) anticipating what science is discovering...that we are just part of the parts manipulating the parts and just part of the recipient of those cloned, modified, manipulated parts and that the only way we can really thrive and enjoy this whole swapmeet is to get really, really informed by global education and communication.
There are many beautiful faces...in fact most every face has its own beauty being taken from the same basic template. And you may want to have one just like the idealized one(s) formed or transformed here from the original (or maybe you prefer your neighbors).
The ideal face (and the ideal body, too) is perhaps the simplest, most even and symmetrical realization of the concentric series of double pentagons which inform the geometric template upon which it is based...the very same template which informs the structural beauty of the axial-viewed DNA molecule itself.
Perfect geometry is like what they say of perfect architecture...it is "frozen music." It puts us into a trance...indeed, time stops briefly as we intuitively soak in its perfection. The geometry draws us back...to the source...the DNA...and its incessant need to clone itself. The expression...the little, and sometimes not so little, distortions of that geometry...is what draws us human.
~Reg Brooks, August 1, 2004