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Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg likes to make faces. But she doesn’t paint or sculpt them, precisely. She doesn’t even decide what they look like.
She started her project by wandering around New York picking up cigarette butts, pieces of chewing gum, and strands of human hair. Then she submitted her biologically marked trash to a laboratory for DNA extraction and analysis. The lab sent back information about the unknown litterers’ sex; ancestry; eye, hair, and skin color; and a variety of facial traits, such as the distance between the eyes and the prominence of the cheekbones. She entered these data into a computer program, which created models of the miscreants’ faces. Finally, she used a 3d printer to produce the wall-mounted objects, eerily like death masks, for her exhibit Stranger Visions.
Not only are the images arresting, but some police think the technology that formed them can actually facilitate an arrest. In January 2015 homicide detectives in Columbia, South Carolina used crime-scene DNA to produce a sketch of a suspect in a four-year-old unsolved murder of which there...