From 1996 to 2007 I created a bunch of morphs using shareware software called Morpher by Japan's Masakazu Fujimiya, with whom I was in touch.

Morphs are animations that transform an image A into an image B via a mapping that the artist creates, mapping, say, a nose in A to a nose in B, an ear in A to an ear in B, an eye to an eye, etc. Rather than simply transforming image A to B, a morph lets you transform different parts of A into corresponding parts of B. Typically, morphs are used to preserve morphological features during the transition from A to B. Some of the morphs are a little different from that, Such as The Egg Word of Ur Exercising, where the transformation is not nose to nose so much as letter to letter.

Which also means you can start out with, say, four pictures of Bush taken on different dates and, by progressively mapping/morphing one to the other, can make it look like Bush is in a video that never happened. Which can be unscrupulous if you pretend that it actually did happen. Which I don't.

Starting in 1996 (with version 1.0), I displayed morphs on the Internet using Morphtea (an anagram of 'metaphor'), a Java applet I wrote that, for a while, was widely used cuz it could display sequences of jpg images when animated gifs were the only option otherwise, for many folks at that time.

Morphtea was distributed on my web site and, from there, made its way to many other distributions, including an unpaid Microsoft distribution, which I talked with them about. They stopped distributing it when I asked to be paid for it.

After Java applets went obsolete, I displayed them in a Shockwave piece. Then that went obsolete. Now I display them using some JavaScript code I wrote. What's new about the current project is some of that JavaScript code; this is the first time for just about all of the animations being presented in JavaScript-powered animations.

Some of these are from War Pigs (2007): Osama bin Laden, George W Bush, Ariel Sharon, Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair and Jean Cretien. Like a few of the others, these ones involve multiple morphs. The one of Bush, say, involves morphing from one image of Bush to another, and then morphing that to another image of Bush. In the animation, it looks like he turns his head several times. Because different pictures of him were taken from different perspectives, and the morphs progressively transformed the perspective, a bit at a time.

One can detect the basis of a kind of cinema that proceeds by mapping/morphing in wee bits at a time, ie, the tweens are relatively short and multiple to preserve morphological verisimilitude and photographic resolution—presuming there is a large enough database of underlying, sufficiently sequential images to draw on. If this reminds you of AI cinema, well, yes, they're related, though not the same. AI cinema obviously is quite involved in tweening, however.

Rather than simply playing the War Pigs animations from start to end and then from end to start, the code picks random points to reverse the direction of play, creating the illusion of a longer video.

Penis Unix is from The Pornomorphs (1996). The Penis Unix morph, like a few of the others such as Burroughs/Boy, Moss/Boy, Cox/Baldwin, Martin/Andrews, Tiger Lily, and History just involve two images. The animation transforms one image to another and then runs in reverse. These were the first and simplest of the morphs I made.

The Egg Word of Ur Exercising appears in Infoanimism (1998).

Moss/Boy was done while creating the Morphtea Java applet (1997).

Morphs are transformational, metaphorical. Metaphors are transformational. This becomes that. This is that. Morphs are visual metaphors.

Often, though, the function of morphs is less poetic than mechanically transitional in a sequence of small morphs that add up to a larger, longer transformation that animates a face (or something else) for several seconds, through various emotions or states.

But morphs can be dramatic. The transformation from human being to animal, as in Tiger Lily, or the transformation from one person to another, as in Burroughs/Boy.

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