The Ideal Man evolves faster than we can by interactive genetic mutation, digital reproduction and harsh artificial selection. Rising from a pool of competing ideals, his incarnations reveal flaws in both manhood and the monsterous myth of perfection.  I employed some so-called 'social networking technologies' in this project (beating Facebook by 2 years) but did so precisely to demonstrate why such superficial popularity contests and identity shenanigans were and remain socially undignified and a seriously bad idea.

The online interactive web based masterpiece was built while I was a resident at Interaccess, and primered at the Toronto Images Festival in 2002.

A large format backlit transparency composite of ideal men was exhibited at SPIN Gallery.

harmsen.net/idealman

The Ideal Man evolves on a Linux server with PHP, GD, Postgresql and Javascript. It was my first PHP based creation, and my first dynamic website to use all open source tools. PHP worked so much faster, more reliably and was so much more logical and easier to use than either Coldfusion or MS-ASP that I never used those shoddy commercial offerings again. When The Idal Man was first built it was very slow due to the complexity of recombining and expressing the genetic code as a dynamically generated image, now it can generate new men in an instant thanks to my current Ubuntu Linux Server being far faster than the IBM286 on which it was first hosted.