Removing Mona Lisa from the Mona Lisa

And now an inventive use of technology transforms one of Western Civilization's most iconic images. Through some Photoshop-assisted sleight of hand, the artist Mike Ruiz has removed Mona Lisa from the Mona Lisa. Here's how Ruiz describes his altering of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous portrait:

The Mona Lisa with the lady selected then put through Content-Aware Fill (a Photoshop CS5 tool that automatically generates content based on the existing surrounding content of the image and fills in selected area). The resulting image is a potential landscape as interpreted by the software. The image was sent to an painting manufacturer in China where an oil painting was produced.

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On first glance, Replaced Mona Lisa achieves the half-remembered quality of incomplete images that we see in dreams. It's both familiar and jarringly disorienting—obviously, something is missing, but without being told I was looking at the Mona Lisa I certainly wouldn't have recognized it.

Here's an image of the original:

I can't tell whether the color palette differences are worth discussing or whether they have to do with the files I've uploaded, so I'll refrain from getting into that. But I will say that the almost geometric repetition we find in Replaced offers quite a contrast to the original.

Via Gizmodo