2018
HEATHER DEWEY-HAGBORG
Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice.
"In Stranger Visions I collected hairs, chewed up gum, and cigarette butts from the streets, public bathrooms and waiting rooms of New York City. I extracted DNA from them and analyzed it to computationally generate 3d printed life size full color portraits representing what those individuals might look like, based on genomic research. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly left behind, the project was meant to call attention to the developing technology of forensic DNA phenotyping, the potential for a culture of biological surveillance, and the impulse towards genetic determinism."
Probably Chelsea consists of thirty different possible portraits of Chelsea Manning algorithmically-generated by an analysis of her DNA. Genomic data can tell a multitude of different stories about who and what you are. Probably Chelsea shows just how many ways your DNA can be interpreted as data, and how subjective the act of reading DNA really is.
Chelsea Manning is the whistleblower who exposed some of the U.S. government's worst abuses and is currently serving a 35-year sentence in military prison for convictions related to those exposures. She is a transgender woman and Guardian columnist and a leader in the movements for transgender justice and government accountability.
Radical Love
2016
Genetic materials, custom software, 3D prints generated
from Chelsea E. Manning's DNA.
Each portrait 8"h x 6"w x 6"d.
Edition of 3 + 1 AP, 3/3
Incarcerated since her gender transition, and rendered invisible to the public due to the prohibitive policy on visitors, no one except her family, old friends, and lawyers, has actually seen Chelsea Manning. In addition to calling attention to Chelsea Manning’s erasure from the public eye, the artwork highlights the forensic conflation of gender and assigned sex at birth, presenting a diptych of portraits to represent Chelsea, one with an algorithmically neutral gender, and the other assigned female. The exhibition of both these possible faces side by side draws attention to the problem of utilizing chromosomes or birth assigned sex to assign gender as well as a larger issue of what it means to rely on stereotyped ideas of what a gendered face is "supposed" to look like.
Spirit Molecule is a series of experiments that imagine a future of biotechnologized mourning. The artist used a process called transgenesis to infuse a lost loved one’s DNA into a psychoactive plant that is meant to be consumed in a final journey of intimacy with the other.
Spirit Molecule III
2019
Genetic materials, psychoactive plants, greenhouse installation, single channel film
Dimensions variable
Lovesick, a literal love virus, is the outcome of the artist's residency with Integral Molecular, a vaccine and drug discovery company based in Philadelphia. Together they invented a custom retrovirus, which infects human cells with a gene that increases the production of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for empathy and bonding.
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The installation consists of the vials of glowing virus, video of the microscopic cells expressing their infection, and a piece of music based on a 14th century ballad by Francesco Landini that tells the story of a woman struggling with a love that is in vain. I have re-written the song to list instead the letters representing the proteins contained in the oxytocin molecule.
" I imagine a lovesick future in which individuals, couples, and groups consume this virus by smashing open the glass vials, pouring the fluid into their mouths, incubating it there for several seconds, then swallowing, while chanting together, or humming to themselves, 'CYIQNCPL'."
HEK293 Producer Cells Expressing RFP 400x Magnification Microscope Station
2019
Archival pigment print mounted on dibond
24"h x 36"w
Edition 1 of 5
How do you see me?
2019
2-channel video installation
6:03 minutes
Download the exhibition catalogue, which features
essays by Joel Kuennen and Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Download the exhibition catalogue, which features
essays by Roddy Schrock, Heather Dewey-Hagborg,
and Dorothy R. Santos