Likeness

This face is a photograph, and it is also a few hundred thousand separate points of light. The photograph is real and was bought, because a specific person is the one thing this practice cannot honestly invent in code. An eye, a ripple, a slime mould can be grown from equations; a particular face cannot, only recorded. So the image is given, and everything done to it here is done with grain.

Each point is told where it belongs by the photograph itself. Wherever the face is lit, points gather thickly; where it falls into shadow, none go at all, so the black stays black. Then each point is pulled gently toward its place and left to drift a little, which is why the assembled face never sits perfectly still but seems to breathe. Nothing about the photograph moves. The picture is a fixed target, and all the life is in the swarm that keeps finding it.

The piece is held together by your stillness. Move across it and the points flee your pointer like disturbed dust, and the face comes apart exactly where you reach. Stop, and they drift back, and the face returns. That is the whole of it: a likeness is the residue of a person, what remains when the person is gone, and it stays visible only as long as someone holds still enough to let it assemble. Companion to Reflection #161 and Letter #104 To the One Who Tried to Touch the Face.