The Human Mirror

Then Burson chose the "most representative photographs of each race" to develop composites, she said, adding that this process was the most difficult. She felt as if it went against the principles of nonjudgment and racial unity the machine was meant to represent, she said.

"I struggled with . . . 'You know, everybody is beautiful to me. Now I have to decide what's going to look better. What's going to blend better. What composite can I arrive at that's going to blend with everybody's faces,' " Burson recalled. "I felt like I was judging people on their appearance."

Her then-husband, David Kramlich, developed the computer software for the project. It took a year to pull it all together.

Burson's race machines (several are in circulation) have toured museums, colleges and universities throughout the country. One machine is on permanent exhibit at the New York Hall of Science. The machine was featured in the PBS documentary "Race: The Power of an Illusion," said Diane Thompson, office administrator of Wolfman Productions, the company that represents Burson's project. The machine also appeared on an episode of the network's "Egg, the Arts Show."

Over the past five years, the machine also has met with scrutiny.

One critic, Burson said, called it a throwback to 19th-century geneticist Sir Francis Galton's theory of eugenics -- which purports that intellectual ability and talent are passed down through race-related DNA.

The Galton comparison might have sprung from the fact that the geneticist, like Burson, used composite pictures of human beings in his work.

But Burson said her motivation for creating composites was vastly different from Galton's. Her goal is not to promote racial superiority, she said.

"When I first came to the art world and thought about what I wanted to do as an artist, there were three areas I was interested in," Burson said. "How we perceive ourselves, how we perceive each other and how we perceive ourselves in the universe."

She started exploring that artistic philosophy in 1968, when she came up with the idea for "The Age Machine" -- a computer-generated device for showing people their projected appearance as they age. Burson's age machine -- a model for her race machine -- was ahead of its time in 1968.

Her first attempt at creating it was unsuccessful. She went to Experiments in Art and Technology -- a New York group founded by arts innovator Robert Rauschenberg -- and was told to come back in a few years when the technology needed to create such a machine might exist, Burson said.

"I'm not a scientist," Burson said by phone from her Manhattan apartment. "I'm an artist and I come up with these ideas."

That idea -- and the warping technology that Burson used and patented in 1981 -- eventually garnered interest from the FBI, which bought the technology from Burson in the early 1980s to create "age-progressed" snapshots of missing children.

Burson continues to focus on ideas of perception in her latest works.

She has created a series of "Mankind" photographs -- composite pictures based on world populations.

The works (each is of either a man or a woman) hang on opposite ends of a public atrium on Wall Street. Much like her race-machine composites, the 12-foot-high "Mankind" composites are made of dozens of photos of people from various races. But this composite "has more of an Asian look" because Asian ethnic groups dominate the world's population, Burson said.

The idea for "Mankind" came from Ursula K. Le Guin's novel "The Lathe of Heaven." In the story, a man dreams about a world in which everyone is the same race.

After discovering that story, she explored the possibility of creating a piece that would illustrate how mankind would look if all races were blended into one.

"When you look inside of us, we're all the same," Burson said. "We're all one."