I'm finding this site absolutely fascinating: the Face of Tomorrow: the Human Face of Globalization, photographs by Mike Mike
What a project indeed! Pity that they didn't find locals to support them and translate for them at least for some countries. They seem to have had some problems due to that (Cologne, as it seems). And interesting that the ycouldn't get enough female faces in some countires. I also find it interesting that mixing faces, no matter which, always seems to make them prettier... even if you take into account, that, during the virtual mixing process, blemishes and small irregularities tend to dissapear so that the computer face always has an andvantage towards our daily selves with sweaty brows, terrible hair and the occasional pimple...
Second thoughts: Hm.... it is a nice thoughtplay (as they called it themselves, an intelectual exercise...). But: I am in doubt of the concept of average those virtual projects always pass on. These pictures may make forget that there will always be far more diversity than the portraits suggest. (Thanks God.) There is a reason why many people in Persia still have blue eyes even though they didn't intermarry with any Europeans during the last generations, why many Europeans are still born with a typical pigmentation on their back that the Mongols brought to Europe (forgot the name of that phenomenon right now), why there are Mongols now and then being born with blond hair (there has been migration towards Mongolia, from Middle Europe, in a small window of time), why redheads not only still exist but even do so in some Northern African counries... and so on, and so on. The portraits are nice to look at, but I am sometimes -just sometimes- bothered by the notion of a typical face as such. Sorry if i am ramblimg. Does anyone get what I mean?
I understand perfectly, Hsing. The resulting pictures look... generic. The world isn't generic. Still a very interesting project though.
You're not rambling at all Hsing. I don't think that the human race will converge on a single face until the day there is only one human left alive. If anything, the population will vary more, precisely because there is more emigration and multiracial relations, there will be offspring of people who would never have intermingled previously, whether that is because of distance or taboo (damn that board game!). And of course, as there will be more variation among that generation, it opens up the possibilities for even greater variation in the next generation. The likelihood of there being a "single" face for a city/country is less than that of a poodle eating a dishwasher. There may be characteristics of a certain place (e.g. a tendency towards blue-eyed blondes in sweden), but there will always be those who are the exception to the rule.
Never, and I mean NEVER underestimate a poodle's capacity to do stupid things. Also Taboo is a wonderful invention that stopped the wave of unwanted pregnancies caused by Twister. Things balance out in the long run.
What?? Hsing, I agree with you to an extent. However, it is noteworthy that, while people from the same place may look very different from each other, there is usually a 'typical' look. The people of every country will have a wide range of facial structures, but each country will have a different average. For example, the average English face is longer than any other European face.
Was anyone able to get the grayed-out cities to work? Prague, for example, since that's as close as the author seemed to have got to Eastern Europe? Or anywhere in Africa? I agree that the individual faces were much more interesting - pimples, mascara smudges and all! - than the composite faces. The latter were way too airbrushed and bland-looking. One of my favorite authors, Dina Rubina, had an expression for that - "banally beautiful". Katcal, your Twister comment made me snort at work. Don't do that!
You keep saying that, but what exactly are you snorting and are you aware it can damage your concentration, and even your brain in the long run (especially if you're snorting poodles) ? Oh and avoid doing it at work, if you get caught, you'll either get fired or they'll want to join in, either way, you lose.
Sure, but the idea is to get a rough picture of what the average of those faces would look like, rather than to make an 'interesting' face. Add your own warts and all! I wanted to talk further about this earlier, but had to go out. So here goes. The project is not saying that everyone will have the same face, but that ethnic blending converges and confirms the average. Imagine populating a country with a group of black people, a group of white people and a group of orientals. The ethnic groups are not segregated, but interbreed happily. In the next generation, you get more variables; mixes of black and white, black and oriental, white and oriental, as well as the original three. In the third generation, obviously, you get more variables again. However, as the generations go on and the groups continue to mix, the average will start to be an indistinguishable blend of the three. You will still get people who look more black, white or oriental, but the average person will look like a combination of those three. Now, that's a very broad-brush picture, but hopefully you get the idea. So I think this is more than merely a thought-exercise. The ethnic blending described by this artist is actually what has happened in Istanbul. That is not the same as saying that everyone has the same face, but that the ethnic roots of Istanbul have mixed to make a type that is distinctively Istanbul. I don't see anything extraordinary or unlikely about this idea. The artist suggests that the same thing could happen in London - that the great mixture of people there could create a new distinctive type within the next few hundred years. I would argue that there is already such a type, born of the fact that England - and particularly London - has, like Istanbul, already seen a great mixture of types over the years. The difference, as the artist observed, is that London continues to do so to a greater extent than most places on the planet, since it is one of the world's biggest cities. Of course, the problem with the project is obtaining a truly random sample, especially since the artist is only photographing 100 people in each place. Still, I look forward to seeing the average face of Tokyo and of New York.
Ditto Katcal, replace ::Snort:: with "chortle", if you like p! As for snorting poodles, I tried that, and they tickle something fierce!
