Amid the life-sized teddy bears, twerking and product placement in Miley Cyrus’ hit music video “We Can’t Stop,” Rhizome staff writer Jacob Gaboury managed to identify the CGI face from Fred Parke’s 1974 University of Utah dissertation research. In the ’70s, the University of Utah was one of the leading research centers for computer graphics in the country and Parke was one of the earliest researchers to digitize the human face. How academia research ended up in a mainstream pop music video is still unsolved but one thing is certain: Parke told Rhizome that he did not receive any compensation for its use in the music video.
Faces of Miley