SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.- The City of Sydney's public visual arts festival Art & About will be launched tonight at Customs House with the premiere of the Face of Sydney night time projections. The Face of Sydney will be projected 20 metres tall onto the AMP Building from tonight until 15 October. There will be an announcement of the winner of the Sydney Life Photography prize, interactive bold installations, live music by the Martini Club, and more.

The Face of Sydney is a ground breaking photographic project which merges the faces of more than 1400 Sydneysiders into one male and female Face of Sydney. The 20 metre tall images will be projected onto the AMP Building at Circular Quay every night from 6 October to 15 October, between 6.30pm and 11.30pm.

More than 3500 Sydney residents were involved in separate photo shoots across Sydney - from Pyrmont to Rosebery, and Redfern to The Rocks. The individual portraits were meticulously layered, creating the composite portrait of the male and female. The oldest person was 93, while the youngest was just two weeks old. The most common first names of people over 30 were Peter and Helen. For younger people the most common names were Ben and Emma. Some 54 per cent of participants described their ancestry as Anglo Saxon Celtic, 3 per cent as Indigenous Australians, 4 per cent as having South American ancestry and 11 per cent Chinese ancestry. The most complex individual ancestry was described as "Tongan, Argentinean, Chinese and Fijian."