Turn Your Profile Picture into a Modern Art Masterpiece
Wish your Facebook or LinkedIn profile photo had a little more Pop?
Now, you can turn your boring old head shot into a work of modern color and shape abstraction, thanks to a new website called (earmuffs for those offended by profanity) simplify.thatsh.it.
The website, via Rhizome Today, lets you “create random modern art by simplifying images to their core elements.” In practice, this means you can upload any photo on your computer onto the website; it will read the various color information in the photo, and then it will spit out a neat, satisfying abstracted representation of that photo.
So, for example, here is my Facebook profile picture.
And here is my profile picture after being fed into the site.
See the resemblance? I think it captured my enormous nose well.
OK, now here’s the Facebook profile photo of David Pogue, our founding editor and lead reviewer:
And here is Pogue, simplified:
I also simplified the album cover for “Dark Side of the Moon” by Pink Floyd, which was already fairly simple to begin with.
And here is the Mona Lisa:
It’s a hit-or-miss tool, obviously, though I’d argue that seeing the minimalist output of a photo redeems it every time.
Also, it’s not like this is a startup with $10 billion funding or anything. In fact, the tool came out of a collaboration between the artists Jen Lu and Tim Nolan, who were exploring the idea of simplification for a gallery show, according to the website. The two artists presented their works, and also uploaded a few example simplified photos that look amazing. Check out the Simpsons couch gag fed into the site, for example.
You can buy professional prints of simplified Simpsons, Mondrian, or Van Gogh on the site, too.
You probably just want to feed your face into this thing, however. You can do so here. Your Facebook friends will never recognize the new you.