A new digital art project with a techie bent has sought to discover the effects of globalisation on identity by taking 100 photographs of people in cities around the world and combining them using a computer to make a single average face for each city.

The project, Face of Tomorrow, posits that if you combine all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the future face of that city.

South African photographer Mike Mike, 46 - who lives in Istanbul but has studied at Sydney University - devised the project. He travelled the world snapping photographs of over 41 different ethnicities and nationalities.

In each city he photographed the first 100 people who he could convince to take part in his project and layered the photographs on top of one another using high-tech software.

For Sydney, Mike has two distinct "average" faces based on shots taken at both Bondi Beach and Sydney University.

But the results, like that for other nationalities, are far more aesthetically pleasing than what most people would describe as "average". And it's not a perfect science - the average South African face is white, strange for a predominantly black country, and blonde hair doesn't come through in the final composite unless 75 per cent of the people photographed have blonde hair.

In many cases, however, the likeness is so strong that it's possible to guess the nationality just by taking a cursory glance at the photo.

It's not a new idea - in 2006, the City of Sydney commissioned photographers to take images of 1400 people and combined them using computer wizardry to reveal a male and female "Face of Sydney". The result was projected 20 metres high on AMP Tower.

Mike notes that Sydney boasts one of the most multicultural populations in the world and this was reflected in the faces he photographed. 35 per cent of Sydney's population were born outside of Australia and this rises to 70 per cent in downtown Sydney, Mike claims.

"The city's population is primarily of European extraction (British, Irish, Italian, Greek and Maltese) with about 15 per cent being of Asian origin (Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Thai and Indian)," he says.

"There are also sizeable communities of Pacific Islanders, New Zealanders, Lebanese, Turks and South Africans."

Mike described his visit to Sydney University as a "veritable United Nations", saying out of about one hundred people he photographed there were 30 nationalities represented.

But despite Bondi being home to large communities of New Zealanders, Israelis, Brazilians, Eastern Europeans and South Africans, Mike said his photo shoot there ended up being a lot less multicultural than he thought.

The resulting photograph is very Anglo-Saxon. "Maybe all the Brazilian and Israeli backpackers were still sleeping when we hit the ground early one Saturday morning," said Mike.

The exhibition can be viewed on the web or at the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Gery in the virtual world Second Life. Cities featured include Sydney, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, London, Cologne, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Istanbul.

Mike is inviting anyone to add their own city by sending in 100 photos, which he will then combine to create a composite face. He says at present there are people in Colombia, Japan, Germany and Holland working on the project independently.

He devised the project while sitting on an underground train a few years ago in London.

"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," he writes on his website.

"I thought 'what is this place, what is a Londoner'?"

A few weeks later Mike was in Istanbul and remarked on the uniformity of the population. He believes this is 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," he said.

"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."