It is more than forty years since the first wireframe images of the Boeing Man revealed a stylized human pilot in a simulated pilot's cabin. Since then, it has almost become standard to include scenes in Hollywood movies which incorporate virtual human actors.  A trait particularly recognizable in the games industry world-wide is the eagerness to render athletic muscular young men, and young women with hour-glass body-shapes, to traverse dangerous cyberworlds as invincible heroic figures.

Tremendous efforts in algorithmic modeling, animation and rendering are spent to produce a realistic and believable appearance of these algorithmic humans. This thesis develops two main strands of research by the interpreting a selection of examples.

Firstly, in the computer graphics context, over the forty years, it documents the development of the creation of the naturalistic appearance of images (usually called ‘photorealism’). In particular, it describes and reviews the impact of key algorithms in the course of the journey of the algorithmic human figures towards ‘realism’.

Secondly, taking a historical perspective, this work provides an analysis of computer graphics in relation to the concept of realism. A comparison of realistic images of human figures throughout history with their algorithmically-generated counterparts allows us to see that computer graphics has both learned from previous and contemporary art movements such as photorealism but also taken out-of-context elements, symbols and properties from these art movements with a questionable naivety. Therefore, this work also offers a critique of the justification of the use of their typical conceptualization in computer graphics.

Although the astounding technical achievements in the field of algorithmically-generated human figures are paralleled by an equally astounding disregard for the history of visual culture, from the beginning 1964 till the breakthrough 2001, in the period of the digital information processing machine, a new approach has emerged to meet the apparently incessant desire of humans to create artificial counterparts of themselves. Conversely, the theories of traditional realism have to be extended to include new problems that those active algorithmic human figures present.