The Bush administration has made a fine art of creating and disseminating its own historical reality, driving the American public into either complicit belief or angry, uneasy doubt.

Psymulation, a group show at Hamburger Eyes curated by Chris Fitzpatrick, invites the viewer to participate in that anxiety-producing moment when we have to ask ourselves if the facts reported to us are truth or fiction. Should we believe the history unfolding before us on the TV or Internet? Each artist presents documents (photographs, video, mixed media and works on paper) that offer "evidence" of our post-9/11 world where everything is viewed through the prism of terror.

The show is prefaced by an actual tape-recorded interview between conspiracy theorist Dr. Armen Victorian and retired U.S. Army Major Ed Dames, a specialist in psychic espionage. The two converse in an atmosphere full of secrets and paranoia about UFOs, creatures from Mars and the US Army's clairvoyant techniques. The listener might want to dismiss these two characters as fringe theorists, but their chatter sets a disturbing mood for the rest of the show.

Gerald Edwards III, Investigation into the Disruption of Power, It All Came From the Same Place, 2007

The composite photos of Gerald Edwards III use digital manipulation to create menacing, hyperactive realities. From the waiting room of a nameless airport, planes engaged in rendition flights swarm through the air, taking off and landing in impossible numbers. Men in ski masks stand against a background of celestial star fields, staring out through mouth and eyeholes, but they have no identifiable features, no mouths, no eyes, only anonymous, featureless skin. Another photo (whose title sounds like an urgent IT alert--Investigation into the Disruption of Power, It All Came From the Same Place) shows a Hazmat worker standing in a corporate office, papers strewn on the floor and a computer flashing: "You've been hacked." Edward takes iconic images that call up our deepest fears--torture behind closed doors, random violence, technology and science as the bearers of viruses and toxic materials--and turns them into photos that are unsettling and very close to believable.

An apocalyptic film loop by video artist Squirrel throws out a steady stream of haunting images: Bush speechifying about nuclear holocaust, armies gearing up with gas masks, the iconic A-bomb mushroom cloud or young war victims with severe burns. Some images are plucked from our Cold War past while others are contemporary, and the mixture of old and new, creates a sense of déjà vu, a realization that the war on terror operates under much the same paranoia as the Cold War.

Brennan Hill's photo, Threatening Chair only adds to the anxiety. The chair is simply an empty optometrist's chair, a medical device, but we can't shake the feeling that something bad might have happened here. Brendan Threadgill's mixed media pieces claim to be fragments of car bombs, but there is no way to prove this. A mangled car roof sits in the middle of the gallery like some uninvited alien. Is it real or is it representation?

Psymulation successfully raises the question of whether in our current political climate we can tell reality from fiction. A nagging doubt runs through every piece in the show so that even when you exit into the alley, a cloud of unease follows. But better unease than complacency.