Facing Up to It

Just recently, as part of this assignment, I used the Face of the Future site to “change my nationality”. And here is the result; upper left is me, upper right is me as Asian, lower left is me as African-American, and lower right as East Indian.

All the flaws in the program aside, it was actually interesting to see a particular take on me as another race. Right off the bat I can see I’m not too far off from either Asian or Indian. I imagine that my more basic and plain features probably allow for an easier conversion.

The program used is along the lines of Nancy Burson’s  Human Race Machine. Burson had become big on using computers to create composite images, merging together, sometimes, the more common features of various figures of notoriety; usually with some odd, and interesting, affects.  She also took various faces from both genders and created composites just to see what features would become predominate.

“My intention in building The Race Machine was to allow us to move beyond difference and arrive at sameness. When I discovered, while doing research on a project involving genetics, that there is no gene for race, I felt it was one of the most important things to understand about genetics. The DNA of any two humans is 99.97 percent identical. And then The Race Machine became The Human Race Machine. We are all related, all connected, all one.” Nancy Burson

The photographer  Mike Mike  had the same idea, riding the London underground.

"Sitting on the underground train, I was intrigued by the sheer diversity of the place. Somalis, Indians, Americans, Zimbabweans, Scandinavians and a hundred other nationalities vying for their place in the metropolis. I thought ‘what is this place, what is a Londoner?’ A few weeks later I was in Istanbul and looking at the relative uniformity of the population. I realized I was looking at the future of London. A thousand years ago Istanbul was the capital of the remnants of the Roman Empire--home to an astonishing variety of peoples from Greece, Rome, central Asia, Arabia and the Russia. Yet now this diversity had coalesced around a mean--almost everyone dark haired, brown-eyed and olive-skinned. And I thought if one could merge all the people in a place like London one would be looking at the future of that place--one would have some notion of what a Londoner is or will become.” Mike Mike

Mike Mike then began his “Face of Tomorrow” project; a book in which he composites faces – male and female, from a particular city, in the idea of discovering what, someday, those residents may, in fact, blend into; much the way he noted the change in his native Istanbul.

In some ways, these are take offs from the very early works of the British scientist Francis Galton (1822 – 1911). Galton, the cousin of famed Charles Darwin, was the first to coin the term “eugenics”; the philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. The original idea behind it was to create a healthier, intelligent people, while managing resources and ending suffering.

Of course, those students of history know how it ended up being used in the days leading up to, and through, World War 2.

Through Record of Family Faculties and The Life History Album, Galton used baby pictures – including the then fad of postmortem photos – and exacting records of family history, going back as far as great grandparents, covering some seventeen points about each relative. These pages were also expandable; being able to add to as subjects grew and matured.

All of these projects were focused on one major thing; the role of cross genetic breeding of the human species moving forward to its inevitable conclusion; homogenization… whether that idea was seen as good, or bad.

While my own composites don’t actual show any homogenization, as much as an ethic conversion, they are pause for thought. If someone were conversing with me, say over chat, or correspondence, and only had one of the altered versions to go on as what I may look like, what would they expect to read? What kind of “voice” would they give my text? What kinds of things would they expect me to say, or refer to, culturally? 

And, how would they react if I didn’t?

In TV and film, we come up against stereotypes all the time. Asians are super nerdy and smart, for example. Or, Indians run convenient stores; though that image has been changing with the mass migration into the United States, and India’s emergence in the tech industry, as well as the outsourcing business trends that begun early in the twenty first century. And then, of course, we have all the cultural stigmatisms that surround what it is to be black in American society, today. 

Hero or thug?

As part of my own work as a Graphic Novelist, I often draw on particular stereotypical features that are common with the ideas of character. Thuggish brutes with barrel chests and lumbering shoulders, or heroic folks with cut features and chiseled, or angled faces. And often, when dealing with a particular ethnicity, illustrating someone requires pulling from a list of basic, common features.

In doing so, I often try to keep in mind how these can both endure a character, as well as create a possibly negative feeling about the character; as has been such the case in the long history of caricature  art and cartooning.  Combating this, I suppose, is just a matter of keeping in mind that besides the face there’s a lot that goes into making a person; keeping in mind family history, personal interests, and education and experience when dealing with different faces.

The face, for the most part, is really a façade. It may show us something of our physical lineage and history, but rarely can it go any deeper to who we are as people, and what forces may have shaped us as individuals. And, as we move forward as a global species, the color and structure of that mask will blend and change, as we inter mingle.

I wonder what notion the faces of tomorrow will carry with them, as they go about the world, neighborhoods, and cities…