Artist Uses Found DNA Data to Generate Photo-realistic Portraits
Just as RAW photo files contain all the information you need to put together a photograph, DNA contains all the information needed for a human being. Information artist and PhD student Heather Dewey-Hagborg has a fascinating portrait project that explores this idea.
What she ends up with is a comma separated text file that’s roughly 25 megabytes in size. This file is essentially the distinguishing elements between that stranger’s DNA and common DNA shared by humanity.
Dewey-Hagborg then feeds this information into a computer program that uses the details to create a 3D model of that person’s face. Finally, the 3D model is sent to a 3D printer at New York University and turned into a physical sculpture.
The portrait at the top of this post was created using a cigarette found under an overpass in Brooklyn, New York:
The DNA revealed that the person was a female of European descent with brown eyes.
Here’s a collection of found DNA samples next to the portrait sculptures they were turned into.
Dewey-Hagborg even did this same process using her own DNA. Here’s what she came up with:
In the project’s artist statement, Dewey-Hagborg says that by “working with traces strangers unwittingly leave behind,” she’s calling “attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance.”
Stranger Visions by Heather Dewey-Hagborg (via kottke.org)
Image credits: Photographs by Heather Dewey-Hagborg
