Heather Dewey-Hagborg

Heather Dewey-Hagborg (born June 4, 1982, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an information artist and bio-hacker. She is best known for her project Stranger Visions, a series of portraits created from DNA she recovered from discarded items, such as hair, cigarettes and chewing gum while living in Brooklyn, New York. From the extracted DNA, she determined gender, ethnicity and other factors and then used face-generating software and a 3D printer to create a speculative, algorithmically determined 3D portrait. While critical of technology and surveillance, her work has also been noted as provocative in its lack of legal precedent.

Education

Dr. Dewey-Hagborg is an information and bio artist whose works explore the intersection between art and science. As a student in the Information Arts program at Bennington College, she participated in computer science classes, which laid the groundwork for the science-based artwork she would later envision using algorithms, electronics, and computer programming. She earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree in 2003. Dewey-Hagborg continued refining her work as an artist and computer programmer, studying artificial intelligence, while obtaining a Master of Professional Studies (M.P.S.) in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University (NYU) in 2007. It was here she curated a robotic performance art show called Robots on the March! in March 2005, and exhibited a piece called Lighter than Air: an experiment in constructing an autonomous flying robot. As a final project at NYU, Dewey-Hagborg explored the question "Can computers be creative?" in an exhibit she called Spurious Memories. She developed an autonomous face categorizing and generating software program which recognized facial components, made comparisons and adjustments, and produced unique representations of the human face through mass exposure to facial images. Dewey-Hagborg continued her education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated with a PhD in Electronic Arts in 2016. As an educator her areas of interest include art and technology, multimedia, digital photography, research-based art and programming, and computer science. Dewey-Hagborg worked as a teaching assistant at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, an adjunct professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and taught art and technology studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As of August 2019, Dewey-Hagborg lives and works in Abu Dhabi, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her courses include Communication and Technology, and Understanding Interactive Media, and Bioart Practices.

Projects

Totem

Dewey-Hagborg's Totem (2010) was a site-specific multimedia sculpture characterizing her earlier work. Totem, an idol, was designed to explore the implications of language and artificial intelligence using machine learning technology. Exploiting audio surveillance techniques to eavesdrop on and record conversations at the installation site, Dewey-Hagborg wrote algorithms to then isolate word sequences and grammatical structures into commonly used units. Influenced by Hebbian theory, she programmed the sculpture's computer to generate speech based on the most frequently occurring language structures in any given recording period. Over time, the least frequently elicited words or units would fade or be dropped from the sculpture's spoken vocabulary. The remaining units, stored in the sculpture's memory, were then spoken at random intervals. Martha Schwendener, of The New York Times, wrote that Totem showed promise, but, because of audio difficulties and its fragmented, randomly generated speech, the piece "failed to connect human speech, meaning, and technology in a profound fashion."

Stranger Visions

Stranger Visions (2012–2013) is a science-based, artistic exploration using DNA as a starting point for lifelike, computer generated 3D portraits. She began this project questioning how much information could be understood about a person using genetic detritus left behind by strangers in New York City. "I was really struck by this idea that the very things that make us human – hair, skin, saliva, and fingernails – become a real liability for us as we constantly shed them in public. Anyone could come along and mine them for information." She hoped, by producing realistic sculptures of anonymous people using clues from their DNA, to spark a debate about the potential use or misuse of DNA profiling, privacy, and genetic surveillance.

As part of her research for Stranger Visions, she took a three-week crash-course in biotechnology at the Genspace laboratory in New York where she learned about the significant amount of personal information that an amateur biologist could learn about someone through biotech processes. She began the process of extracting DNA from the samples she collected. The extraction involves treating a hair sample, for example, with a gel that dissolves the hair, and a primer specifically developed to help locate characteristics like eye color or gender along the genome. She might repeat this process up to 40 times, looking for genetic variants influencing traits like eye color, hair color, and racial ancestry, in order to complete a portrait. Once the DNA strands are extracted from the samples, she then amplifies, or copies, specific regions of the genome, using a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR, a process advanced by Kary Mullis, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1993). These amplified regions of the genome make it possible to identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced "snips"), which contain variables in the base pairs that give clues to a person's individual genetic make up (e.g., whether or not a person's eyes might be blue, brown or green). These results are then sent for analysis to a company for sequencing. She used 23andMe, a DNA analysis service, for Stranger Visions.

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