Ever wondered how humans will look in 50 years time? An exhibition in London predicts the answer may lie in the digital world.

When Nicolas Cage and John Travolta swapped faces in Hollywood action film Face-Off, most viewers thought they were watching a far-fetched fantasy.

But US scientists have already carried out face transplants on dead bodies donated for medical research. They are now awaiting approval to do the same on living people with disfigurements.

A new exhibition at London's Science Museum raises questions about the implications of this technology for society.

Future Face, which opened on Friday, asks if the widespread use of digital enhancement to "improve" faces in photos suggests the kind of face people will choose to have in the future.

This face is smooth and narrow, with a small jaw, big lips and manga Japanese eyes for the females
Professor Sandra Kemp

Already Britons spend more than £225m on cosmetic surgery and 25,000 people undergo treatment each year.

The majority of these operations are for vanity, although some have a medical purpose.

Redesigning a whole face is still some time off but maybe not too far, as the exhibition reveals.

The University College London has developed a 3D scanning tool which enables surgeons to experiment on faces without actually touching them.

It scans the patient's face and maps more than 50,000 coordinates to an accuracy of about half a millimetre.

Will the quest for physical perfection make us look more like robots?

This can become a 3D model for trial and error to seek out the best changes, but it cannot yet redesign a whole face.

French performance artist Orlan has probably gone as far as anyone.

She has publicly undergone plastic surgery several times as part of her act, to try and look like a computer-generated ideal made up of several classical images of beauty, including Mona Lisa.

Beyond these surgical possibilities, research into DNA engineering suggests there could be a time when what we look like will be genetically programmed.

Digital conditioning

The Future Face curator is Professor Sandra Kemp, director of research at the Royal College of Art and a leading academic in visual culture.

"I don't mean the exhibition to be a warning because it's interrogative, raising questions, but I hope it will make people pause for reflection," she says.

"We've got diverted by the sensation of face transplants but something that interests me is what is happening digitally.

"Lots of people don't have sticky photo albums anymore. Their pictures are held digitally and they can be altered on Photoshop. People are enhancing their faces all the time.

Ms Kemp wants society to reflect on what lies ahead
"We are subtlely being conditioned by the digital face and heading towards a face which no human being could have been born with.

"This face is smooth and narrow, with a small jaw, big lips and manga Japanese eyes for the females."

Artists have added their own dark twist to the exhibition, by adding spooky qualities such as android-like eyes to the "perfect face".

These concerns appear to be echoed in the exhibition.

No expressions


Professor Kemp fears the bombardment of digitally enhanced images in the media and on our PCs will lead us to lose the features which make the face unique.

"The more we smooth out our face, the more we are depriving it of its abilities," she says.

But the wider repercussions could be more significant. The exhibition hints that alterations to the face can have a huge impact on our conception of identity.

As Professor Kemp points out, the world's first hand transplant patient went on to have the limb amputated after appealing to surgeons to cut it off.

We could have produced a beautiful exhibition of portraits, but there is a grit of doubt, saying 'Do we really want to go here?
Dr Timothy Boon
Science Museum

New Zealander Clint Hallam said it was like a dead man's hand and he felt "mentally detached" from it.

The way identity and face are entwined is further emphasised today in the use of biometric scanning and facial recognition for security purposes.

Future Face starts a long way behind that, by exploring how the face has been depicted and altered throughout history.

It opens with the declaration: "The face is our interface with the world. Through it we navigate personal, social and cultural spaces."

Hollywood has been replicating faces for decades

There is a blend of material from anatomy, portraiture, forensics, medicine and popular culture from pre-historic times to the present day.

Surprisingly, plastic surgery is not a new phenomenon.

As early as 600BC a Hindu surgeon reconstructed a nose by using a piece of cheek and by AD 1000 there was nose surgery using skin from the forehead.

But while Future Face can be sure about what has happened in the past, it raises more questions than answers about the future.

Dr Timothy Boon, head of collections at the museum, said: "Twenty years ago the Science Museum told us what to think, but this raises questions for people to think over.

"We could have produced a beautiful exhibition of portraits, but there is a grit of doubt, saying 'Do we really want to go here?'"

Future Face at the Science Museum runs until 13 February 2005.

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She does know what would mean eyes like this right? ;

The eyes the oh so massive and hypnotic eyes!

Really, how can they really say what peoples faces are going to look like in the future, its just guesses but you never know they may actually be right!

Yeah but in 50 years??? 50 years is not so far away in the scheme of things. Maybe in say a 100 + years.

U have a good point there lottie 50 years is`nt really that long is it but with the advancements that are being made all the time things will be so different in just 20 years so in 100 years the changes will just be mind boggling!

You have made a very good point there Aztec! Technology is amazingly fast nowadays...60 brownie points to you. The mind does boggle, I cannot even imagine what weird and wonderful things are going to exist a 100 years from now. Thats if the world even makes it to another 100 years considering the state its in at the moment...

I recently read an article where a scientist was saying that the human race has only a 50/50 chance of surviving the next century. His evidence supported the human race being destroyed by itself or a natural disaster in the next century sometime!
I just hope thats not that case since the human race has such potential and could really achieve something in this universe, lets hope we do survive so we can see all the changes and advancemenats the human race makes!

And 100 brownie points to you lottie for bring up another great point!

the answer is in the past, if we look at painting and statues of the past they pretty much look the same as us, there's a few aspect that may change do to micro-evolution ( as we are much taller then they were 500 yrs ago).

the other thing that may create change in humans is the "etnic" mixing. This will create the most impressive changes. In a more estetic way we have the "cosmetic inhencement" (which is really a missuse of medical knowledge) for those who can afford it, it will be the way to modify the outer shell of the body.

Technology may have more to do with the "what is human" question then "what are humans gonna look like".