The Human Mirror

"I thought it would give people, maybe especially of mixed race in their background, insight about other possibilities," he said. "There's a lot of people who fall in like an in-between category, what [might] be considered racial androgyny. I think people have a difficult time with that. What exactly are the rules that make up race? In the end, they don't really mean anything."

On a recent weekday, more than 50 ninth- through 12th-graders from Century High School in Carroll County, which is predominantly white, lined up to use the machine during a field trip.

Nicole Diem, an art history, ceramics and drawing teacher at the school, said she believes the machine helped her students broaden their cultural and racial perspectives.

"I think that it gave them a much better understanding of a variety of cultures and how they can see themselves within that culture," Diem said. "We live in rural Carroll County. There's not a whole lot of variety."

Marwa Morsi, a 16-year-old junior in the school's Arts, Humanities and Communications Academy, was taken by the machine's promotion of unity. The deeper message of the race machine, said Morsi, who is of Middle Eastern descent, was that "everyone's the same on the inside. It's the outside that's different."

Burson was commissioned to create the work by directors of the Millennium Dome, a series of interactive and mixed-media exhibits presented through 2000 in Greenwich, England, to celebrate the new millennium.

When they approached her in 1998, Burson was thrilled to be a part of the exhibit, but she did not know what she was going to present, she said.

Together, Burson and Zaha Hadid, a London-based architect and one of the program's directors, brainstormed and came up with the race machine.

The machine's mechanics are almost as complex as the philosophy behind it.

A digital camera takes a picture of your face. You then plot specific points -- your eyes, nose and mouth -- on a grid and then select a "race" (the machine categorizes the options as black, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, Middle Eastern or white). The machine blends your picture with a composite photograph of whatever ethnicity you have chosen.

The artistic process, Burson said, was sometimes a struggle.

When she started the project, she hired students from New York University, where Burson was an art professor from 1988 to 1994, to photograph people of various ethnicities.