DNA PORTRAIT from TED Blog on Vimeo.
Will you one day peer through a gallery window to see a face that resembles yours and realize your hair follicle was the model?
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Artist Heather Dewey-Haborg collects hair shed in public spaces–maybe from the bathroom sink in a restaurant, the subway, any number of chairs–and turns them in to 3-D portraits.
Using resources at New York’s non-profit community biolab, Genspace, Dewey-Haborg works to sequence the DNA to create masks that could resemble the person who dropped the hair might look like. In a “Bones”-inspired twist of research, she’s even worked with a European company that makes facial recognition software to help regenerate faces.
“The kind of biggest influence this project has had on me is that now I’m very aware of everything that I leave behind,” Dewey-Haborg said. “So when I sit on the subway and you know, run my hand through my hair, I notice if there’s a hair on my hand and it falls to the ground in the subway. You know, I pay attention to all this stuff now.”
I bet. This borders that ever so thin line of creepy and cool. DNA sequencing has a lot of implications for personalized medicine, but who knew it had so many for visual art?
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“Heather’s work is really interesting because it’s a very accessible way for the public to engage with this new technology,” Ellen Jorgenson, president of Genspace, said. “It really brings to light how powerful it is–the idea that hair from your head can fall on the street, and a perfect stranger can pick it up and know something about you. And with DNA sequencing becoming faster and cheaper this is the world we’re all gonna be living in.”
But the certainty of DNA sequencing’s role in our lives isn’t what draws Dewey-Haborg to her artistic pursuit. Quite the opposite.
“I’m really interested in that uncertainty. And I’m really interested in exploring what we’re uncertain about now but may be certain of in the future,” Dewey-Haborg said.
