page_title: Heather Dewey-Hagborg
section_title: Stranger Visions
hierarchical_section_title: Heather Dewey-Hagborg / Projects / Stranger Visions
caption_attribution_description: English: sample 3 portrait
context_page_description: Heather Dewey-Hagborg 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.
context_section_description: Stranger Visions (2012–2014) is a science-based, artistic exploration using DNA as a starting point for lifelike, computer generated 3-D 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 use or the potential 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. 
  The genetic blueprint she receives in return is a text file full of coded information identifying the unique positioning of the 4 nucleobases adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, or ATC and G, that make up the sections of the genome she is interested in. This data is then entered into a customized computer program she wrote. The program interprets the code and provides her with a list of traits, including propensity for obesity, eye color, hair color, hair curl, skin tone, freckles, and gender. She then takes these traits, as many as 50, and enters them into a face-generating program to configure the 3-D portraits. Her previous experience with facial recognition algorithms gave her the ability to repurpose an existing facial recognition program, from Basel, Switzerland. She reworked the program to generate faces instead of just recognizing facial features. The resulting model changes facial dimensions (e.g., width of the nose and mouth) and characteristics with the genetic information it receives. Before making the final 3-D print, She generates several different versions of the face, finally choosing the one she finds most aesthetically pleasing.
  Critics of Dewey-Hagborg's Stranger Visions question whether or not the work crosses ethical and legal boundaries. They make a distinction between an artist's right to express societal concerns through artwork and the act of collecting personal, genetic information without informed consent. The fact that DNA samples are regularly "left behind" or abandoned does not mean those people have relinquished their interest in how that information is used.
  Some laws, like that of the Human Tissue Act of 2004 in the United Kingdom, prohibit private individuals from collecting biological samples for DNA analysis. What laws that exist to regulate the collection and use of DNA samples in the United States are not consistent among the states and
caption: Stranger Visions portrait "Sample 3" [33]
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