ancient-faces.12.hqx

[Info-Mac]

Download: http://archive.info-mac.org/art/ancient-faces-12.hqx

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.

Howzitdone?: Max (Opcode- but, no longer supported by this co.) is an
object-oriented program builder, you patch functional modules together
in a kind of circuit, like the old Moog Synthesizer. The circuit
patchers are hidden behind the black .pict background.