The Collective Self

How a computer would generate a picture based on a given set of pictures?

The Collective Self is a experimental software written in different programming languages that makes the representation of a human face by using a dataset of pictures from different human faces.

The Collective Self - Jorge Moreno

The source dataset of pictures had to share some sort of common pattern and look a bit similar so the resulting image would follow the same pattern as the source, as a result the chosen group of images to be used on the project were a collection of police record mugshots found online from a jail located somewhere in Illinois, the official pictures of the members of the United States Senate and, the intranet profile company picture of every current employee of the Los Angeles 72andSunny office.

All of them have in common similar backgrounds and body and face positions, so the generated image would have to look somehow in that direction.

The method used to generate those new images was by creating an automated process that would take all the pictures one by one, extract the RGB color data and coordinates of every single pixel of each different picture, store all of that information in a database, and later on analyzing that data, the software creates the probability of how the new pixel located in a certain coordinate is gonna look based on the existing information, combining all of those new generated pixels a new image based in the previous data is born.