Cog and Dat

Before the invention of Photoshop, Nancy Burson worked with engineers at MIT to develop a computer program that could morph multiple photographs together into a single image. Her motivation for developing this custom software came from her desire to create an image of how a person would age, therefore allowing herself to project her own image into the future. Working first in computer graphics as part of the organization Experiments in Art and Technology, co-founded by Robert Rauschenberg, Burson went on to collaborate with engineer Tom Schneider from the M.I.T. Architecture Machine Group. Together they created and patented the software The Method and Apparatus for Producing an Image of a Person’s Face at a Different Age, which the FBI adopted as a means for imaging missing people and victims of abductions years after they were last seen. Burson continued to perfect her image-morphing software and explored different artistic applications of the new technology to create strange hybrids, morphing celebrities, people of different races, and animals of different species.