He’s Just Had Coffee

I love facial blend projects. I saw a lovely project that blended faces from different suburbs in Brisbane to make average faces from places like Inala and Redcliffe. The artist (whose name I tragically can’t recall) researched the demographics in each place: gender balance, proportions from different ethnic backgrounds, age curve and then picked a set of a hundred people which matched the demographics. The faces were beautiful and oddly affecting, as I’ve discovered facial average portraits usually are, and since they were prints about 2.5 metres tall the effect was entrancing. This guy took a whole Greek soccer team and blended them to make the average Greek face.

… which looks like a Greek statue, so you think big deal… then you see the pics that he averaged to get the image most of whom look a long way from a Greek statue… So today, I found this project called, “Face of Tomorrow” which is taking the idea on a more global scale. This guy called Mike Mike, based in Istanbul but born in South Africa, goes to different cities, photographs a hundred people and makes his view of an average male and female face for that city. It’s art not science, so it records Mike’s impressions rather than strict demographics. Here’s the male face of Sydney:

Mike says:

The project has now taken on a life of its own, like a computer code or virus, and at present there are people in Colombia, Japan, Germany and Holland working on the project independently of Mike.

So if anyone knows about other projects like this, let me know and I’ll update this page.

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