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Heather Dewey-Hagborg

Abstract

     This paper gives details about the information artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s background and her most known projects. Dewey-Hagborg’s works are focused on the dangers of DNA sampling and bio-hacking. The Mentioned projects are in chronological order; Spurious Memories (2007), Stranger Visions (2012-2013), Invisible and Replace (2014), Probably Chelsea (2016), Suppressed Images (2017), T3511 (2019), including the background of Chelsea Manning whom she collaborated in Probably Chelsea and Suppressed Images, and background information about the Golden State Killer whose story inspired the T3511. In the conclusion section, Dewey-Hagborg using her knowledge for the better is mentioned.

     Keywords: Heather Dewey-Hagborg, information artist, bio-hacker, Stranger Visions, DNA analysis, DNA extraction

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     Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and bio-hacker based in New York. Her works combine art and science as she mostly works with DNA to create her visual art pieces. She got a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Bennington College in 2003, she majored in Information Arts and took computer science classes which would later help her in her projects. In 2007 she started her Master of Professional Studies in Interactive Telecommunications at NYU.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg,

Spurious Memories, 2007.

     By that time, she was already studying artificial intelligence and as her final project for her master she was interested if computers could be creative and opened her first exhibition called Spurious Memories, in this project she generated a software program that recognize and compare different facial photos she uploaded and produced new unique face images using mass exposure. She will later use this programming technique for her projects.

     Heather Dewey-Hagborg continued her education with a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Electronic Arts in 2016. She is currently teaching in the art and technology fields for university students.

     Between 2012 and 2013 Heather Dewey-Hagborg started her most known project called Stranger Visions. She says the idea came when she was in a therapist’s office and noticed a hair stuck between a glass protecting a print on the wall, she started imagining the person who probably does not even realize they have a piece of hair in that room. This led to her wondering what one could learn from this genetic artifact, but since she was an amateur in the biology laboratory, she took crash courses to research this idea more thoroughly and combined her programming abilities to create this project. Her main aim was to create a debate around this project and make people aware of how much privacy we have left since we are leaving our hair, gum, skin, saliva and nails in public without giving it a second thought.

     To begin the project, she started collecting DNA samples from the streets of New York and documented the place and the date of collection. To extract the DNA from the samples she did at least fifty extraction processes to find out the gender, hair color and ethnicity of the owner of the sample. After doing her process she would then send the sample to a DNA analysis company, she used 23andMe, these companies analyze the sample and give background information such as the person’s hair type, hair color, tendency to have certain health issues, eye color, ethnic background, likeness to have certain traits. But the most important part of the project is the person’s coded information identifying the positioning of their DNA strands. This text file will make up the sections of the genome she is researching for the project therefore giving her more information of the person’s exterior. This data will be entered into a customized computer program Dewey-Hagborg herself made. After this process, she will have at least fifty traits of the owner and put all this information into a face-generating program, which she made for her master’s final project and evolved it for this project. She makes the program create several profiles and then chooses one of them as she pleases.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stranger Visions Sample 7, 2013.

     After Stranger Visions started to get attention from the media, as Dewey-Hagborg herself expected, the project started lots of debates around its ethical aspect and its legitimacy. While one would think leaving our DNA in public doesn’t mean we give consent for it to be used by whoever, it’s not illegal in lots of countries. Dewey-Hagborg curated her samples from the United States, New York, which is one of the many states that doesn’t have a law against collecting DNA samples without consent. Meaning, it is legal. When asked about the project’s ethical boundaries Dewey-Hagborg states that she left out most of the specific things she could find from the samples such as the owner’s genetic predisposition and their diseases, and focused on her main aim, being provocative.

     In 2014, Heather Dewey-Hagborg started selling two products, Invisible and Replace. Stranger Visions aimed to make people realize how little privacy we have left and Invisible and Replace is the product of what we can do to prevent being the product of Stranger Visions. Invisible spray by itself can only erase the 99,5% of DNA we leave at the surface with a bleach mixture. Replace erase the remaining 0,5% with a mixture of DNA collected from over fifty different DNA sources.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Invisible & Replace, 2014.

     Later in 2016, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning opened a collaborative exhibition called Becoming Resemblance. Chelsea Manning is a whistleblower and radical activist from the United States. Manning is mostly known for her prison sentencing. After providing WikiLeaks, a website for leaked documents, the website’s biggest launch of unauthorized state secrets, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The day after the sentencing Manning came out as transgender but was refused to get the treatment she was supposed to be given and in 2016 she started a hunger strike and managed to get attention from around the world. After 10 days she was allowed to go through her gender reassignment procedure. While all of these were happening Manning and Dewey-Hagborg were in touch for their exhibition. Manning was forbidden from visits, so she sent Dewey-Hagborg cheek swamps via letter. Dewey extracted Manning’s DNA and started her project called Probably Chelsea.

     Probably Chelsea tells the story of a transgender woman who has been behind bars and wasn’t allowed to get visits throughout her gender-confirming procedures. Chelsea Manning wanted to get back her visibility, which she was denied and worked as a collaborator in this project. Dewey-Hagborg was already creating Stranger Visions as she pleased, so she made some changes to make this project more powerful. She decided to create two portraits, one gender-neutral and one female. In 2017 they also wrote a story called Suppressed Images talking about the process of creating Probably Chelsea. The day after Suppressed Images was released President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence and she is now free.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Probably Chelsea, 2016.

     In 2018, Dewey-Hagborg released a short film collaboration with Toshiaki Ozawa, a known cinematographer, called T3511. T3511 is a four-channel video installation about a biology artist falling in love with an anonymous DNA donor. The artist wants to work with a saliva sample and purchases it from a website. The main character, a biology artist, follows Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s footsteps in her own projects and creates a portrait of the sample owner. While working on the sample the artist slowly falls in love and gets obsessive over the owner of the sample. The project was created to ask questions about how our relationships will change over time while biotechnology is getting more and more accessible every day. In an interview with the duo, they mention that they were inspired by the story of The Golden State Killer finally getting caught after almost 40 years.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, T3511, Composite Film Still, 2018.

     Joseph James DeAngelo is a serial killer, serial rapist, and burglar known by the public by the name of Golden State Killer. He first committed his crimes in the early 1970s and ended in 1984. Since the technology was not as advanced as it is now, the police couldn’t catch him. Later in 2017 with genetic examination websites getting more popular, the police uploaded DNA samples that they got from the victims to sites like 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and GEDMatch. If any of your relatives already sent their own sample, when you get the results, you can see who they are and how immediate relative you are to them. With this knowledge and the evidence, the police already collected, they narrowed the suspects to only one person. Even though this seems like a positive side of the whole ‘genetic data collecting sites being accessible to the public’ debates, raising awareness about how accessible it is and how this can affect us should always be our priority.

     To conclude the projects and Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s approach, one can say she’s one the few people who positively uses her artificial intelligence knowledge. She combines science and art in all her projects, and she aims to warn the public about the dangers of the usability of our DNA, which we leave everywhere without thinking twice.

References

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