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Fictional characters sketched by police software (images)

by ZDNet Author  |  February 15, 2012 7:00am PST  |  Image 1 of 12

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'The Composites': Vaughn
Writer and artist Brian Joseph Davis takes law enforcement software designed to create images of suspects and brings it to bear on descriptions of characters in novels. The results make up his new Tumblr-based/crowd-sourced art project, "The Composites."

"I think the not-quite-3D rendering makes for an uncanny effect," Davis told Crave, "especially on literary characters, who don't exist--and even rendered like this, still don't quite exist."

In the crowd-sourcing aspect of the project, Davis solicits requests for characters/subjects from readers of the blog. What follows are some of the images, along with the descriptions Davis referred to while creating them.

Vaughn, "Crash," J.G. Ballard

"His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth... As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards... But what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence... Heavy black hair... Broken and re-set nose bridge... His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance... His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile."
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It seems that police "photo-fit etc." software does nothing but change the faces of even best of people into "obvious" crooks. So in real life are they ever looking for the right person?
A Worry

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