In the early 80's Nancy Burson was introduced to a computer morphing technology that helped shape her art. This same morphing technology was sold to the FBI by Burson and her then husband. That software is now used to age progress missing adults and children.
Burson used this program to combine recognizable faces in multiple ways. She did several where she merged the faces of famous female movie stars to attempt to create a perfect form of beauty.
The image on the left is a composite of Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and Marilyn Monroe.
The image on the right is a composite of Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields and Meryl Streep.
It wasn't just women she did though. Burton also did several war pieces where she took each leaders face that had nuclear weaponry and combined them in the percentage of nuclear power they had.
The image below is 55% Reagan, 45% Brezhnev, less than
1% each of Thatcher, Mitterand, and DengLater Burson adapted her computer software to be able to deal with the races. The software now has several algorithms that reflect six different racial profiles. She has started an on going project called "The Human Race Machine". This series it currently traveling around to different universities to show students what they would look like as a different race. Her main goal is to show the similarities not the differences between races to help all people become one.
"I think what's important is that we understand that we are 99.9 percent alike. It's all about sameness and not about difference, and I think if we focus on that then it would further our chances of going from "I-ness" to "We-ness" to Oneness, and I think that is what will hold humanity together," Nancy Burton. (http://www.marquecornblatt.com/art/hybridity.html)
Along with the traveling exhibit she also has several billboards (shown below).
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