Here is something that may or may not be of interest to some of you . . . as many of you know, I teach Contemporary Literary Theory and Criticism at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the university . . . and . . . in today’s theory course, the discussion of Liberal Humanism touched a bit on the concept of human universals . . . this reminds me of a very interesting photography project called Face of Tomorrow . . .

. . . Note that while the four folks on my page look like folks you might see around on campus, they are in fact composite photos . . . the photographer takes or has people from around the globe take one hundred photos of people in a place . . . these represent the potential “face” of that place for the future, a genetic possibility so to speak. He then separates them into male and female groupings and then further separates them into groups of sixteen to do a composite morph where he combines the features of all of the folks in the set to create a “face” for that place. He found that normally, the groupings of sixteen invariably create faces that are nearly identical and when he uses 32, they are identical. When using 100 or more photos, the composite is often the “human mean face” found by other artists doing similar work.

It’s a very interesting project and he is expanding it to more locations throughout the globe. He has invited other photographers or just folks willing to take the photos to join in and his page has info on how to do that. Perhaps some day, we’ll see the Face of NCCU or the Face of Taipei or Taichung or where-ever.

Those of you interested in trends towards globalization will note that some cities in the world . . . such as the crossroad cities of Turkey . . . have always been places where larger mixes of ethnic and cultural groups have met and mixed . . . creating “local faces” different from surrounding areas . . . globalizatoin has made possible metropolitan cultural and genetic mixes never before possible in human history . . . many of the cities he has done have very mixed racial groups in the photo sets and new local faces are emerging, changes in human racial patterns . . . perhaps.

In any case, it’s a very interesting project (the four folks pictured on my page about the project look like real people you would meet somewhere but who don’t actually exist . . . they are the Sydney and Hong Kong mixes).

Interesting.