Heather Dewey-Hagborg

In the summer of 2017 Dewey-Hagborg's collaborative exhibition with transgender activist Chelsea E. Manning opened at Fridman Gallery. The exhibition was an iteration of the artist's successful and controversial Stranger Visions project. In the case of A Becoming Resemblance, Dewey-Hagborg created a series titled Radical Love, 30 3-D printed portraits of Manning, based on cheek swabs and hair clippings that Manning sent her while incarcerated for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. While all 30 portraits were based on Manning's DNA, their variances in skin color and features presents the malleability of DNA data. The installation demonstrated how much the human genome is up for interpretation once condensed and subjectively interpreted." A Becoming Resemblance has since traveled to numerous institutions for exhibition, including The Transmedial in Berlin, Fridman Gallery, MU Art Space in the Netherlands, and the 2018 Seattle Art Fair.

After graduating from NYU, she became a doctoral candidate in electronics arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is expected to graduate in 2016.

As of August 2014, Dewey-Hagborg resides in Chicago, Illinois, teaching art and technology studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As an educator her areas of interest include art and technology, multimedia, digital photography, research-based art and programming, and computer science.

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.

In 2013, Dewey-Hagborg was contacted by an assistant medical examiner in Delaware, as a result of her work with Stranger Visions. The project involved developing a portrait of an unidentified woman whose case has remained unsolved for 20 years. She agreed to be an adviser to assist with the case. Though the resulting portrait based on the unidentified woman's DNA could only be as accurate as existing technology allowed, leaving room for speculation, Dewey-Hagborg viewed working on the case as the only potential use for this type of face-generating technology. "If you can add anything at all to her description, if you can increase the possibility her loved ones may find her even one little bit I think it's worth it." Critics of Dewey-Hagborg's involvement in the Delaware case express concern for what they call "D.I.Y. forensic science" and question the role of civilians in state investigations.

Stranger Visions (2012–2014) is a science-based, artistic exploration using DNA as a starting point for lifelike, computer generated 3-D portraits.

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.

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.

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 rarely address the private sector. Only some states, like New York, outlaw most DNA testing without written consent. Others worry about the misuse of the information, fearing discrimination based on existing medical or mental health issues or a predisposition for disease-related illnesses or "unreasonable" searches of DNA evidence by law enforcement. One scientist and one gallery, according to Dewey-Hagborg, turned down her proposal fearing the project would "cause a fright" among people.

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.

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.

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.