Nudity You Can't See

An art director and friend of mine was clearing out her and her husband's huge collection of books and ephemera and came across something that I thought only existed in jokes: The Braille edition of Playboy. No centerfold, I am assuming.

On the other end of the spectrum, artist Jason Salavon has gone into centerfold overload. He created art by blending the images of every Playboy centerfold, mathematically averaging the color and value of each, one per decade. This is every Playmate from the 1980's:

So Miss November 1981, who presumably does not appear in the Braille edition above, is hidden amongst the pixels here. To see the art based on other decades, click here. I really like how they are completely luminous and ethereal, like a soul should look.

Salavon has done similar amalgamations (his term) of class photographs, special moments, and architecture, video amalgamations of late night talk shows, and an audio amalgamation of twenty-seven versions of the song "Yesterday." He also has interesting art based on still frames from movies. 

I obviously can't get enough of this kind of thing. Once I created visual formulas to depict some of my friends (you know, "You are like two parts Yukon Cornelius and one part D-Day and a dash of My Name is Earl") and one of them created a similar formula for me. It included Duchamp, John Linnell from They Might Be Giants, and the animated groom from The Corpse Bride, among a half dozen others. I blended them all together, Salavon-style, to create a metaphysical portrait of me:
Salavon creates his own software to make his art; I just fiddled with Photoshop layers. Here are my friends Scott, Wayne, and Fran, done the same way. Hidden in there are Saddam Hussein, Orson Welles, George Harrison, Dylan Thomas, Terry Gilliam, Casper the Ghost, and many others.