Museums are great to bring you knowledge, broaden your horizons, and support the arts, but one museum situated in Quebec City decided to try something new. It is said that everybody has a few doppelgangers around the globe, and the museum wants to match you with a real sculpture and find your ancient twin.
The Musée de la civilization started a project called “My 2000-Year-Old-Double” that will match people’s faces with their ancient Egyptian or Greco-Roman sculpture doppelgängers. The exhibition will compare modern photographs with 60 sculptures that are 2000 years old, originally from the collections of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art and from the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, and anybody can participate in the project.
According to Mental Floss, similar technology used in ATM security systems and emotion-reading apps will be used to make the matches in the project:
“Modern photographs are run through a facial recognition software program called Betaface API. After analyzing 123 facial landmark points, the API creates a template based on those features and searches for sculpture templates that compare.”
After making the matches and analyzing the candidates, 30 pairs will be selected from the submissions and will be displayed in the exhibition, running from October 24, 2018 to October 27, 2019, in Quebec City’s Musée de la civilization.
The photographer participating in the project is François Brunelle, who is known to work with doubles. He will capture the photographs for the exhibit and showcase the pairs side by side to show the similarities between the person and the sculpture.
Anybody that wants to participate in the project and receive their match is welcome to submit their photos via the museum’s website. Everybody analyzed will also be considered for the exhibit.
Even if you don’t get picked to appear in the exhibition, at least you’ll find out who your match is and know what sculpture you have most similarities to, ranging from beautiful gods to powerful royalty, roman athletes or even a greek nymph. Who knows?
Planning on participating in the fun project? Let us know what your match was on our Facebook page or in the comments below!
