Not Such a Good Head on His Shoulders

Despite our political differences, my kudos to the local OC Blog who realized that the office for a local Vietnamese-American politician, Trung Nguyen, had Photoshopped his head onto another person's body in order to place him closer to the celebrity Governor of California for a photo-op. The story was subsequently picked up by The Los Angeles Times in an article about his "image problem." (I've been thinking a lot about bodies and their manipulation in new digital media, because I read Anna Munster's Materializing new media: embodiment in information aesthetics and Michele White's The body and the screen: theories of Internet spectatorship as my airplane books last week. Both books analyze the work of Internet artists like Mongrel, whose work at the Tate reconfigures the museum's collections around issues of class, race, and gender and uses composite bodies in works of digital art.)

For another humorous political Photoshop story on Virtualpolitik, you can see who went to Disneyland unbeknownst to prospective voters.