Ancient Faces

ancient-faces.12.hqx Multimedia show, plays mystic music while morphing life-like portraits from the 3rd cent. A.D. Fayoum collection of Roman art. YOU NEED: OS 7 +, - 9 Quicktime, Sound Manager Realized on a Mac 8500 PPC (system 7.5.2). Virus checked. Compressed with Stuffit Lite. Free to individuals for their private enjoyment. Distribution by CD Rom and other means OK . Please notify by e-mail. The Fayoum Poraits are Roman in origin and were painted with oil on wood in Egypt ca. 200-250 A.D. They were face-boards bound over the heads of mummified corpses and intended to not only preserves the effigies of the dead, but also to help them "see" from the afterlife. They are amazingly life-like and modern, painted with a sense of reality, dimention and perspective that vanished from Europe during the Dark Ages, not to re-appear until the Renaissance. The individual personalities in the paintings seem to project themselves across the ages with a vivid presence. The portraits themselves are scattered among a dozen or so museums. View and learn about the portraits on the web at , the World Art Treasures URL. The portraits are used here with the kind permission from Dr. Jean Berger of the J.P.Berger Foundation. QUICKSTART: locate the ancient-faces.12 app. in the program folder and double-click to load it. To start and stop, press the space bar. You may have to hit the space bar several times to stop if you catch it between notes, so to speak. Sometimes spooky aftertones occur!! Do not remove the application from its original folder as it operates with hidden folders. The music plays on the Mac's internal speakers, Close by selecting "QUIT"from the Apple bar file. Type "s" to scroll the 19 portraits. Type"x" to turn the sound on and off. What you see: the images have been made into a move within a MAX patch and they are cycled back and forth at different rates until one is selected by a random process. This creates a kind of morphing effect of faces changing and growing as the frames flip by. Eventually all 19 portraits will be shown. What you hear: The music is derived from the numbers used to cycle the pictures, only they are interrupted and randomly skewed in a different fashion. The process is akin to an algorithm because there are "basins of attraction" created by interconnections that produce recognizable musical and rhythmic patterns. I used 3 sound samples, a flute, a kind of brass bass and a tamborine stroke.