Jason Salavon scanned every Playboy Centerfold from January 1960 to December 1999, and outputted a mean image representing each decade in the form of a 5-foot-tall, ghostly photograph. Over time, the women got skinnier, blonder, and whiter.

playboy.jpg

Jason Salavon says any of his 100,000 digital printouts would pass the Turing Test for painting. When you get close to the one at the Henry, you can tell its a print—but not until youre close. Up to that point, its incredibly convincing.
  • Jason Salavon says any of his 100,000 digital printouts would pass the Turing Test for painting. When you get close to the one at the Henry, you can tell it's a print—but not until you're close. Up to that point, it's incredibly convincing.
Salavon makes all kinds of digital images. At the Henry Art Gallery now, in addition to one of these centerfolds, is one of the 100,000 convincingly expressive abstract paintings that Salavon printed out en masse. He calls them Golem. A golem, in Jewish folklore, is a living creature made of inanimate matter.

Salavon also writes his own software. Arguably, his use of zeroes and ones gives him as much creative power as an artist who is tapping into the infinite possible hues of the color red, say. There's a great hacking tradition in digital art, and Salavon takes after one of its masters, Nancy Burson, best known for having developed the Human Race Machine. Back before she was an artist, at MIT, she invented the aging software police would adopt in the search for missing children. If you haven't tried her Human Race Machine, you must.

Both Burson and Salavon are in The Digital Eye at the Henry, and Salavon is coming to Seattle soon! He'll do a workshop at Photographic Center Northwest on September 14 and talk at 7 pm September 15 at the Henry. Details coming soon here.