Face of Tomorrow

You can’t tell me this isn’t extremely kool and beyond interesting. Well, you could, but you would be so far wrong as to be asounding.

Photographer Mike Mike has created a project that looks at trends towards globalization and puts a human face on it . . . specifically, the Face of Tomorrow.

Mike, who hails from South Africa but works in Istanbul, Turkey, noticed that his adopted city has a face . . . a face based upon ethnic blends and crossings that have been happening over thousands of years as Istanbul is one of those crossroad cities where people from different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, and nationalities cross paths and mix, leaving their progeny who in turn mix with others until the face of the place was established.

Mike notes that while humanity has always had unique places like Istanbul where diverse peoples have mixed and shared their DNA, today, thanks to air travel and worldwide trends toward globalization, we have more mixtures possible, many of which have never been possible before. Each metropolis across the globe now has such intense diversity, well, more than before. Sure, many Americans like myself can claim to be a product of our mythical melting pot (my own ancestry includes a rather large mix of ethnicities and nationalities ranging from Amerindian (Quohadi Comanche and Cherokee) to Northern European (Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland, Germany, Holland, and France) to African (thanks to a slave-owning ancestor named James Carter of Plains, Georgia – yes, the same family – who sired an offspring by one of his slaves named Polly Carter), a trend that has continued in my family into the present day (obviously).

Mike has postulated that by taking photographs of today’s inhabitants of a city, we can then composite them to create the face of an individual of tomorrow . . . the face of the future . . . someone who represents the heritage of the various person’s inhabiting that city today. He uses one hundred photographs as his baseline but has found through testing that often the face is already there, hidden underneath so to speak so that even when his early experiments in Istanbul used ten batches of ten individuals, the resulting ten composites looked remarkably similar. While in batches of twenty, they were virtually identical. For his morphing purposes, Mike tends to use batches of sixteen. Once you use batches of sixty-four or one-hundred-twenty-eight individuals, you begin to start getting a human type which has been explored by Nancy Burson (see also Unnatural Science Human Race Machine and Seeing and Believing).

For Mike’s work, be sure to take a look at the faces with the composites of each location as well as many of the individual portraits of real people used to compile the face of that location. Those who are interested, can add their own city as well so expect to see Taipei sometime in the future. The Face of Tomorrow is an open source project which means anyone can participate and contribute.

For those with an interest, Mike also offers a Morph Me section of his site which allows folks to send in images of themselves and their significant others (or celebrities, it that’s your thing), regardless of gender mix, to see what their potential children might look like. Personally, I don’t need to do that as I’ve already done some morphing the old-fachioned biological way so I know that ugly ol’ me plus my beautiful wife morphs into my wonderful daughter, good old-fashioned DNA-morphing technology in action, no computers required.

Now, I’d really like to see something along the lines of the body of tomorrow going further than Spencer Tunick or the Tokyo and Yellow series.

Either way . . . this is pretty neat stuff . . . Face of Tomorrow . . . I’ll say it again . . . very kool.

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