Milestones
Contemporary
in Visual Arts
by Heather Dewey-Hagborg
VN-250624_S
Algorithmically generated portraits, sculpted from anonymous DNA found on city streets, marks a pivotal milestone in bio-art, critically dissecting the emergent culture of genetic surveillance and the precarious nature of identity in the age of big data.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Stranger Visions” began with an observation and a question. The artist became transfixed by a single hair lodged in a crack on a framed picture, prompting her to consider the vast, invisible trail of genetic information we leave in public every day. This led to a multi-year project where she collected forensic artifacts like stray hairs, cigarette butts, and chewed gum from the streets of New York City. In a community bio-lab, she extracted DNA from these samples and analyzed specific genomic regions, or SNPs, known to correlate with physical traits. Dewey-Hagborg then fed this data into a custom-written computer program that parameterized a 3D model, ultimately generating a possible face for the anonymous donor. These digital blueprints were then brought into the physical world as full-color, life-sized sculptural portraits using a 3D printer.
The conceptual and sculptural depth of “Stranger Visions” is profound, marking a critical intervention at the intersection of art, science, and surveillance. The work is a powerful exercise in sculptural thinking, transforming abstract data—sequences of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs—into tangible, three-dimensional form. These faces are not traditional portraits; they are not likenesses of specific individuals but rather speculative reconstructions, or as the artist calls them, “one genomic interpretation.” Dewey-Hagborg herself highlights this inherent uncertainty, stating that the process was “complex and nuanced and messy.” The project’s milestone quality lies in its material translation of a complex ethical dilemma. It gives a face, or many possible faces, to the unseen data we shed, forcing a confrontation with our own biological vulnerability. The work compellingly argues that our identity is becoming a target for surveillance in ways we have yet to fully comprehend. As Dewey-Hagborg noted, “there was a huge surveillance risk that no one was talking about. At least not since Gattaca in 1997.”
The broader impact of “Stranger Visions” was immediate and resonant, anticipating a future that has quickly become our present. Just two years after the project’s exhibition, the company Parabon NanoLabs launched a commercial service called "DNA Snapshot," offering to generate images of suspects for police from crime scene DNA. This development confirmed Dewey-Hagborg's work as not just speculative, but prescient. Her project moved beyond the gallery to become a central reference point in public debates about bio-ethics, privacy, and the potential for a new form of genetic profiling.
Critics and scholars have noted the work’s power to make abstract fears tangible. It challenges the viewer to consider, as Dewey-Hagborg puts it, “What kind of world do we want to live in?” By creating these haunting, anonymous faces, she exposes the fallacy of genetic determinism—the idea that our DNA is a simple, readable blueprint for who we are. Instead, the subtle variations and generic quality of the portraits suggest that identity is far more fluid and complex than any algorithm can capture, posing a critical question about the authority we grant to data.