I’ve been so impressed by the mashups in DS106; every time I go back to the site I find something new and delightful to look at. I’m still at the neophyte stage of mashing up media, but I thought it would be fun to show a mashup that my husband has been doing for a while. My husband is known for his Facebook profile photos, and has been doing mashups of them for maybe 6-7 months.

The process: He finds a photo that is recognizable because it is iconic or because it is part of current popular culture awareness. He then uses the webcam built into his laptop to take a photo of his face at approximately the same angle as the face in the photo. Then he uses MS Paint to paste his face on the other photo, and voila! He’s done the Blues Brothers, Audrey Hepburn, Bob Marley, Willy Wonka, Grover, Einstein, and the Old Spice Guy to name a few.

The thing that I find fascinating is that it’s supposed to be an obvious, cheesy mashup. If I had come up with the idea, perfectionist me would have brought both photos into Photoshop, and spent hours matching color, tone and lighting so that it blended perfectly, especially given that the profile photo’s standard view in Facebook is quite small. But despite his access to state-of-the-art digital tools, my husband chose to use MS Paint, about the oldest digital drawing program known to man, installed way back in the day on Windows 3.5. He may even have had to download it specially to get it on his Vista machine! He wants the mashup to be obvious and the results are hilarious. Friends will check his page just to see what new pic he’s got up, and it’s fun to try to guess some of the less obvious. I think there are some deeper statements that could be made about his conscious choices of media and tools, but I’m too tired at the moment to parse them out. Below is a screenshot of his profile pics folder from Facebook, and you can see the majority are these type of mashups.