In an age where artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prominent, we must become weary of those who walk among us. Who is real, and who is a machine? As the decades go by, it will become more difficult to answer this question. Your best friend could be a cyborg and you would never know.

(My blog makes the image seem like it’s squished together. Right click it and choose “View Image” to see the right proportions.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This activity was done for the “For the Remix” assignment. I made this image using a portrait from Jonathan Worth’s website, Creative Commons images of a metal skull and bar code, and GIMP. First I turned the whole image’s color to a silvery-blue to try to mimic the dramatic lighting found in a Terminator movie or something. Then I selected half of his face, cut it away, and pasted it as a new layer. Making it a new layer allowed me to freely rotate the piece without messing up the rest of the face. When I rotated it, I wanted it to look like half of his face was breaking open like a pinata to reveal his metal skull.

The skull was another layer in itself and it was was moved to fit directly under the face layer. The problem I had with this was that the skull was an image that faced directly forward while the face was turned at an angle. I tried to fix this by slightly warping the skull to turn it a bit. The red eye inside the skull was done with a series of fuzzy brushes and Gaussian blurs (to add the glow) Meanwhile the other eye was red to show that there was also a red light behind that part of the face too.  Finally, I added the bar code to his forehead to show that he is just a product; an android that could be bought at an AI industry. (this layer’s opacity had to be turned down to make it look like it was naturally printed into is forehead.)

I had ALOT of fun making this and I was impressed with how it turned out. My first idea was to open his head and inside there was going to be the inside of an apple, symbolizing knowledge. But that would’ve been too easy and I went with something much cooler. I mean, would you rather have a fruit for a brain or an advanced piece of technology that could grant you the power to do unimaginable things? Yeah, I thought so.

Why he read all of the ancient and modern parables of the Wise One, especially borrowing attributes of those who took on Empires, like Jedi Yallow, for later training. He than sought out The Boing Boing Being in the deep depths of Hainault Forest, spending weeks at his feet, taking notes on his iPad.

This is a quick remix example for an exciting ds106 project, where our students are among the first to get a crack at remixing the portrait photos of Cory Doctorow that Jonathan Worth is sharing with the world for open remixing. Jonathan described it for us

and as well visited with me and my students during this week’s ds106 show. To be a base for the site, and knowing the flood of action once Cory announces this on Boing Boing, I suggesting hanging the web site on wordpress.com- with the name borrowed from internet speak and one of Cory’s books — For The Remix

The first set of photos is available at http://fortheremix.wordpress.com/photos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (please no license debates, ok?). The original high resolution images (as large as 50 Mb) are stored on Amazon’s cloud.

For now, our method of collecting remixes is embarrassingly simple- we want people to write up their entries ds106 style, and add a link in the comments to our HOW page.

For my students, they have a ds106 Mashup assignment they have to do for this last segment of the course.

And that’s where I want your help. We want to have a good variety of examples of remixes before we take the project to the wide open web. We are hoping people di more than simple images, like I did here, but actually think about making stuff. I’ll be nagging a lot of you ds106ers to do this. You have been warned.

Okay, for my remix above, the original image or Cory sitting on his chair reminded me a bit of Yoda:

I found an image of the scene where Yoda is teaching Like in the woods in a post from Death Star PR A Chronological List of Things Yoda Tried (and Completely Failed) To Do:

I was thinking at first that I would replace Yoda, maybe with a flip horizontal to match the angle Cory is sitting at. I took both into PhotoShop, and used the magnetic lasso to select around Cory’s shape and remove the background. When I started moving and resizing over the Star Wats scene, I realized hw was a better match to replace Luke, and the concept made sense- Yoda learning from Cory Doctorow.

I had to do a bit of clone brushing on the original layer to wipe out Luke’s foot, but it fit pretty good. Once I had Cory’s photo in place, I used Images -> Adjustments -> Hue Saturation checking the “COlorize” box to try and match the green hue of the star wars scene. Not too bad, eh?

I left a copy of my PSD file for anyone who cares to fiddle. Since the start wars image was low quality, I did te sloppy thing and up-sampled, which I know is not good, but sue me. I made a 300dpi version PNG at 3600X2842 px (7 Mb).

I just wanted to have one quick example out the door first! My next one is going to be an animated GIF..