Red Self-Portrait, No Fumare por Favore, and Self-Portrait are unique virtual portraits that explore the relationship between the traditional forms of photography, painting, and sculpture with digital imaging processes, including computer graphics. While collaborative in nature, these have become personal pieces, due to the untimely death of Chicago Imagist painter, Ed Paschke. (art)n began working with Ed Paschke in 1997 on a series of virtual portraits and self-portraits (comprised of digital 3D CyberWare scans of Paschke) that connect to earlier works produced in collaboration with Academy Award winner, Chris Landreth, Brad deGraf and other digital artists. Collectively, these works explore the semiotics of the virtual human, and "post-post-modern" representations of human gestures and facial expressions in a virtual world. Critics and curators are beginning to recontextualize post-modern works by Mariko Mori, Charles Ray and Jeff Koons, an early assistant to Paschke, to bridge a gap between digital and traditional scholarship. These pieces celebrate a marriage of aesthetics, a fusion of artistic processes and a shared vision for reinvigorating the "post-human canvas" for future generations of artists.

In a 1987 essay, Hudson, a performance artist and Director of Feature Inc. speculated "A look at art's recent buzzwords identifies our reorientation: simulation, appropriation, deconstruction, reification, contextualization, suspension, confalte, signify, collapse, rupture. And the overview of this decade's most critically regarded art-works by Prince, Sherman, Levine, Charlesworth, Lawler, Kruger, Welling, Brauntuch and Koons-reveals this common ground-the examination of text/subject, believability/fakery, and authority/multiplicity."

Hudson acknowledged "(art)n's PHSColograms participate in this dialogue regarding the new reality. They present images which are not only more real and believable than those found in traditional photography, but also even more fabricated and fake. As with the works by the seminal artists already mentioned, the life of art is dependent upon the willingness of the viewer to suspend his/her orientation and play both in the believability of lies and the falsehoods appearing true-to-life. When the subject of the PHSCologram is no longer an image of something in our tangible world, but rather a computer generated deformation of a four-dimensional mathematical equation, the empirical indexing of the abstract image/object becomes further obfuscated by the clarity of its representation. How is it that a 4D math equation is simulated as a 2D image by a computer and then made to appear to be a 3D form floating in the flat space of a photograph? . . . Familiarity and seductive appearance keep the viewer returning to this art which poses doubt and reflection at its core."

The Hairy Who was formed in Chicago in 1966: "the players in the drama were the exhibition coordinator, Don Baum, a veteran of the Momentum wars, and six young painters, who affecting the habit of the rock groups of the day called themselves The Hairy Who. James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum had all come of age in the decade of Pop Art, and the subjects they pulled up from the lower depths of the American visual vernacular showed it. Yet, as if to resist the model set by New York, they tended toward an especially impudent coarseness and vulgarity in their work. This was skateboard Pop; by contrast such Manhattan stars as Warhol and Rosenquist were sleekly uptown, high-style, and urbane. Baum followed his first presentation of the Who with group exhibtions by several other artists of the same generation and kindred stylistic inclinations, most memorably Ed Paschke and Roger Brown. The majority of these painters were SAIC graduates, and even if an overtone of mocking irony distinguished their work from the earnestness of the 1940s/50s group and the brooding lyricism of later fantasts like Barnes and Irving Petlin, their persistent reliance on the figure, especially the frontal image, led some observers to discern a connection among the generations and to suggest that there was a Chicago School in painting as surely in architecture. The term Imagism, coined to embrace the whole postwar figural phenomenon, was later taken over by dealers, writers, and collectors close to the Hyde Park Art Center and made to apply only to artists associated with it. The approproation, if in large part factionally self-serving, proved spectacularly successful: during the late 1960s and the 1970s and even beyond, the later Imagists, dissociated (some would say liberated) from the early ones, became the most celebrated Chicago art movement of the century, winning the national attention so long yearned for locally, so long withheld." (Art in Chicago: 1945-1995. pp. 25-26)

Ed Paschke graduated from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago with a BFA (1961) and MFA (1970) in painting. He was a regular visiting artist at SAIC, and was currently a Professor at Northwestern University's Department of Art. He received an Honorary Doctorate from SAIC in 1990, and became a member of the Board of Governors in 1995. Paschke belonged to a 1960s school of artists known as the Imagists, whose work using images from pop culture contrasted with modern abstract art; he was personally influenced by Gauguin, Picasso and Seurat. In the 1960s his work incorporated images of public figures like Lee Harvey Oswald on vibrantly-colored canvases.

In 1983, Ellen Sandor formed (art)n with her peers from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, creating immersive, sculptural mixed media installations that are recognized as early examples of Virtual Reality environments. The result of this collaboration inspired the invention of Virtual Photography (PHSColograms), which are in the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Museum of Jewish Heritage, and others. (art)n's extensive portfolio explores subjects that place the most current issues of art, science, technology and visual history into the public arena for social discourse and debate.

The PHSCologram process begins in the computer, where the models are created using a 3D modeling application such as Maya. The objects are sculpted as if working with digital clay, and painted textures are created and applied to the surfaces of these models. Once the scene is complete, it is then rendered to create a series of 64 separate images. The virtual camera pans across the scene, giving each image a slightly different perspective. After rendering, the 64 images are composited into one image using (art)n’s proprietary software. Through this process known as computer interleaving, columns from each image are rotated and recombined to form the final image. This image is then printed on archival transparent film and laminated to the backside of a piece of plexiglas. A barrier screen of alternating clear and black columns is attached to the front side of this same plexiglas. When matched up to the interleaved image on the backside and placed in an illuminated lightbox, each of the viewer’s eyes see a slightly different perspective. The brain fuses these multiple perspectives together into one 3D virtual image.

Chicago has always been a haven for artists, like The Hairy Who and (art)n, who make and break their own rules to re-imagine the future on their own terms. The city's urban landscape, unlike no other, offers its local community and visitors a culturally active canvas of ideas that never sleep. It is our hope that this special folio will inspire future generations of historians and artists working in both traditional and contemporary media to examine the past with an eye towards the future: A R T über-alles!

Special thanks to Jim Zanzi, Lisa Stone, Karl Wirsum, Mr. Imagination, Hudson, Stephan Meyers, Jack Ludden, Fernando Orellana, Todd Margolis, Nichole Maury, Sabrina Raaf, Paul Neumann, Pete Latrofa, Keith Miller, Janine Fron, Maya Polsky, Eva Belavsky, Darthea Speyer, Uri Vaknin, EB Smith, Eric Lee, Thomas Southhall, Gwen Berlin, Diane Tepfer, Jean Albano and Carl Hammer.

Excerpt from Popisms: "Post Human"
Robert Rosenblum on Body Doubles
ARTFORUM INTERNATIONAL, October 2004

"Post Human" was virtually a manifesto trumpeting a new art for a new breed of human. As Dietch's text explained in the fragmented mottos that punctuated the billboard-style graphics of Dan Friedman's catalogue design, "It is becoming routine for people to try to alter their appearance, their behavior, and their consciousness beyond what was once thought possible." And we go on to read, "With the embrace of artificiality, Realism as we used to know it may no longer be possible." The glossy color plates spoke volumes, whether the illustrations came from art or from "life." The catalogue was to become something of a cult item that triggered the imaginations of many younger artists. Here was a permanent anthology of "posthhumanity" that surrounds us not only in galleries but on television, in magazines, even in real life, where the friendly androids among us chatter on about Botox and face-lifts. In the catalogue pages, one could see, for instance, four photos of Jane Fonda in four completely different but equally synthetic guises; Pat Buchanan being made up by a cosmetician for a TV appearance; computer morphs of once-human faces; before and after bellies and buttocks; and dead center, a profile view of Michael Jackson, clearly the sun of god of this new solar system, who would later be deified by Jeff Koons.

This pure plastic environment, whether peopled by Ivana Trump or Barbie, set the stage for the artists in the show, whose works played perfectly in this parallel universe that was quickly replacing that old-fashioned thing called Nature. The result was a complete reshuffling of the contemporary-art deck, with an international mix of thirty-six artists (singles and pairs) that embraced Thomas Ruff and Jeff Wall, Clegg & Gutmann and Pruitt/Early, Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney and Yasumasa Morimura, Charles Ray and Martin Kippenberger. A new dynasty had installed itself, and this ruling class demanded fitting ancestry.

As for precursors, two venerable masters are illustrated in the catalogue's introductory pages, though not represented in the exhibition itself: Duane Hanson (Woman with Dog, 1977) and Gilbert & George (photographed during the 1970 London performance of The Singing Sculpture). Hanson was a particularly astute choice to give parental authority to this latest strain of clones. At the time, high-minded art people generally considered Hanson to be cut of the same antimodernist cloth as Norman Rockwell, an embarrassingly trivial populist artist who, sure sign of insignificance, could always make the turnstiles spin. (In fact, when Kirk Varnedoe was first considered for the MOMA appointment, one of his adversaries pointed out that back in 1985 the candidate had written a monograph on Hanson, a disclosure intended to disqualify anybody who aspired to be a serious curator.) By the early '90s, the received wisdom on Hanson's art had done an about-face (or several): The sensationalist hack whose effigies belonged in Mme. Tussaud's was suddenly a father figure to a new generation of hip posthumans. Hanson, cameo as a "Post Human" parent quickly led to a leading role in a 1997 retrospective at the original Saatchi Gallery on London's Boundary Road, a habitat programmed to feature the future.

Hindsight being twenty-twenty, we now know that the show nurtured brilliant progeny, along with resuscitated precursors - whether the new brood knew it or not. In fact, on the heels of Deitch's show, a fresh crop of body snatchers was reported in and bout London. Had they been around a few years earlier, they might well have made their debut in "Post Human." Prime candidates for "Post Human, the Sequel" are the Chapman brothers (who worked as studio assistants for posthuman archetypes Gilbert & George), Vanessa Beecroft (whose spectacularly uniformed or naked performers extend the Gilbert & George Singing Sculpture pedigree all the way back to the Rockettes), Ron Mueck (who mixed a little Gulliver into the DNA of Hanson's life-size creations), and Maurizio Cattelan (who reincarnates Hanson's tableaux as full-blown real-life theater). The list goes on and on-Marc Quinn, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Mariko Mori, John Currin, Yinka Shonibare-which is a again a tribute to the way in which "Post Human" got right to the roots of a flourishing new genealogical tree for later-twentieth-century art.

And as usual, new art changes old art, and the present rewrites the past. The sex machines and robots of Duchamp and Picabia, Léger and Schlemmer may now seem Old Testament prophecies, as do the mostly prosthetic German war veterans depicted by Grosz and Dix. Reverberations can even be felt in a welling appreciation for a once-scorned art of centuries past, the hyperrealist polychrome sculptures of the Spanish baroque, with their real hair and fake tears. The search for proto-posthumanity is on.