“What I’ve carried with me since then and think back on very fondly is the encouragement to work against boundaries and not concern myself with disciplines.” Virgil Polit ’05, who had already been working within the art and tech areas for several years before coming to Bennington. “I think in the first week of school he built a robot and put it out on the lawn,” she laughs, remembering. Polit helped her with the technology and inspired her ideologically and artistically. (Dewey-Hagborg has since spent time in the San Francisco Bay area working in robotics.) The book Information Arts by Stephen Wilson further broadened her vision by portraying science and math as integral to—rather than separate from—art and culture. Her time at Bennington solidified her personal synthesis of disciplines. “What I’ve carried with me since then and think back on very fondly is the encouragement to work against boundaries and not concern myself with disciplines. I believe that I can learn anything, and my art is this process of learning; it always begins with questions.” The question that her forensic portraiture attempts to answer arose during a therapy session, when Dewey-Hagborg became riveted on a crack in the glass of a painting, and then on something under the glass: a captive human hair. As she described in her TED interview, “I couldn’t stop thinking about that hair. Whose hair it could be, what they might look like, what they might do. I kept thinking about all these forensic shows we watch on TV and the fascination we 3 0 • b e n n i n g t o n ma g az i n e
have with the science of trying to figure out from evidence who was there.” Her walk home seemed as rife with forensic evidence as any crime scene. How available have we unwit-
tingly made our identities to whoever wants to find us, track us, know us? How vulnerable are we? In order to explore these questions she has had to dig deep into biology and genetics—areas she had no formal academic training in, which didn’t stop her. Working at GenSpace in Brooklyn—a community biotechnological laboratory where anyone can apply for membership to use equipment necessary to extract DNA—Dewey-Hagborg spends sev-
eral weeks gleaning the genetic profile of a single hair. A great deal of her artistry goes into writing the computer program that translates the genetic markers into characteristics of a face, which a 3D printer then outputs in sand and glue: a realistic mask that differs from others by its skin tone, eye color, distance between eyes, distance between nostrils, and several other traits we are just beginning to associate with certain base pairs. Dewey-Hagborg’s self-portrait is no driver’s license photo (and thank goodness for that), but it shares her fair skin and blue eyes, freckles, typical weight, and Northern European ancestry. Another volunteer DNA donor, Kurt Andersen, host of public radio’s Studio 360 was pleased with the portrait Dewey-Hagborg’s process yielded from a swab of his inner cheek. Not because the fresh-faced mask was an accurate resemblance, but because it imagined to this father of two daughters a new possibility. “It’s the Matt Damon version of me,” he explained. “I’m thinking, wow, this could be my son—my cloned son.” Indeed, the public response to Stranger Visions has been enthusiastic. As Dewey-Hagborg told Smartplanet.com, “The predominant reactions I get from people are fascination and curiosity and interest. Most of the e-mails I get are from people who want to send me samples and have their own portrait done.” Given that the process takes several weeks and the cost (not including her time) can reach $1,000, the artist is holding off on fulfilling these requests, although she is considering them. She has discovered something artists historically discover: Human vanity makes painting portraits profitable. And who can blame us for wanting to be seen? B Heather Dewey-Hagborg returned to campus in late November to deliver a talk about her work, which is documented in brief in this TED video: bit.do/deweyhagborgTEDvideo