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In this video Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek combine to create a new person. Start with two familiar faces and create someone vaguely familiar, who exists only in imagination.

»Now Playing on YouTube Cruz, Hayek : A Photo Never Taken

The La Gata video exposes the software foundation behind a digital media portrait that seems like someone you know.

The term “la Gata” is a tribute to these two Latina superstars. It’s a slang term that, loosely, means “female cat.” The proper Spanish word for cat is the masculine, “el Gato.”

The Making of La Gata

The La Gata painting and video were digitally produced using a variety popular software applicaitions running on ordinary computers.

Gwen Stefani - Sexy

Gwen Stefani goes from sad to happy in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube.

Gwen Stefani - A Range of Emotions

Peter Gabriel - Digital watercolor and stylus

For 2008 I’m adding video clips. Peter Garbriel ages 20 years in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube. (The one below is higher quality.)

Peter Gabriel - Yesterday and Today

Brian Eno - A photo never taken

Although we’re not exactly sure what Shakespeare looked like or whether or not Da Vinci actually painted his own self-portrait, there is no historical anonymity for contemporary artists who live under the watchful gaze of the photographic eye. In fact, the same might be said about anybody who has a photo ID. It’s hopelessly likely that someone who takes an interest in you at some future date will have a good idea of what you looked like.

Enter a name, and you’ll turn up any number of photos of famous people. But, if you were searching for Brian Eno, you couldn’t have turned up this one, until today. That’s because it isn’t an actual photograph. Isn’t it interesting how human beings have the same demeanor, even over a span of decades? The photographs that seeded this image are years apart, but the "ghost" inside still shows through.

Eno - Before and after morphing

If you’re interested in Eno, San Francisco’s Laughing Squid, Scott Beale, has a great clip of Eno talking about his 77 million paintings.

Vanilla Transhuman

The idea for this image came from the movie Vanilla Sky. The main character is in love with two women, and at one point he can no longer tell them apart in his mind. I morphed the two actresses together to see what they might look like as one.

Can you imagine a near future in which human cloning is possible, with celebrity fans who want to DNA-splice their children with somebody famous? You can actually copyright your DNA but I don’t think its clear what would happen if someone was cloned against their will.

This work dates back to Summer 2003.

The Philip K. Dick portraits incorporate the phenomenon of light. If you look at the animation long enough you should see interesting retinal effects. The Flash wave effect is called a moiré pattern.

Memes - based on a photo never taken

Philip K. Dick was a science fiction writer, best known today as the inspiration behind movies like "Blade Runner", "Minority Report", "Paycheck" and "A Scanner Darkly". These images date back to Spring of 2004 and are posted here for the first time.

Update: The animation was newly coded. Version 2.1 is scaled down to a smaller size because the version first posted here was consuming too much bandwidth.