You wouldn't leave your medical records on the subway
for just anyone to pick up and read.
But we are leaving DNA in public
all the time for someone to find.
We forget that there's this massive surveillance
program happening all around us.
We really need to think a bit more
carefully about biological surveillance,
about biotechnologies in general.
What's okay and then what's not okay?
With surveillance we were so focused on the electronics
that we've completely forgotten about the biological.
So I'm trying to help you mask your DNA so that
we can exercise more control over the
shedding of biological traces.
It's hard to really overestimate how important it is.
The stakes are so high when we're dealing with life itself.
I'm Heather Dewey-Hagborg.
And I'm an artist.
One of the main reasons I've been
interested in working with technology
or science as an artist in general,
is because it's a way of engaging with this
environment that we're surrounded by.
Exposing or revealing things that go
unseen, unnoticed, making the invisible visible.
So I've been working with surveillance as a theme in my work.
Right now we are more surveyed than
we've ever been in the history of humanity.
When I noticed that we were
spending all of this time thinking about
the electronic data trails were leaving.
But we weren't actually thinking about
the physical traces we were leaving.
Cigarette butts and chewing gum and hair.
I just felt like I had to dig into it.
I had to understand what was becoming
possible and going undiscussed.
I steal DNA.
People are just leaving their DNA all over the place
and leaving artifacts which anyone could come along
and mine for information.
A lot of my work begins to the question in this particular case
the question was: what can I learn about
someone from a single hair?
So that led me to working on this research project, Stranger Visions,
to render an actual likeness of a person from DNA alone.
The process involves taking a sample,
extracting DNA from that sample,
then amplifying sections of that DNA using
a technique called PCR, polymerase chain reaction.
Then I take that information and
then I output 3D model of that face,
which is printed in full color.
Biotechnology is a new form of technology
that's coming to influence our lives
in incredibly intimate, personal ways
that we are, in many ways, not thinking about.
The rapid DNA Act would allow police officers
to take a suspect's DNA
and put the sample straight into the FBI database.
Privacy should be a choice.
Biological privacy should be a choice.
The more that we're databased,
the more that our information is accessible,
there's a question of how possible it is
to have biological privacy.
I was researching Kary Mullis, who is the inventor of PCR.
He imagined today, maybe 10 years in
the future where you'd be able to buy
something called DNA anonymous.
And it would be a spray that consisted of
amplified sections of people's DNA that
you could use for covering up your DNA traces everywhere.
And so when I read about this I thought well where is the spray?
Why has no one made this DNA anonymous spray?
That's sort of where the idea for invisible came from.
So invisible is a DNA counter surveillance kit.
It's a suite of two sprays: erase and replace.
Erase is good for wiping away traces of DNA.
Erase is 50% bleach and water.
The replace spray is essentially
cloaking your DNA traces with DNA noise.
Replace consists of more than
50 different sources of human DNA.
I think of Stranger Visions and Invisible
both as being kind of exploits,
in the hacker sense of the term.
Utilizing vulnerabilities as a way of revealing something.
I package up sets of invisible and then
plant them for the casual passerby to notice
and perhaps pick up and use.
People love to say: but why should i care?
I have nothing to hide.
And I think that's a very privileged position to be in
I don't even think we've begun to really
understand what the stakes are.
Where does this affect populations?
Where are there the social justice concerns
that scientists might not even notice?
I'm an artist so for me it's really about
pointing to these issues.
What I'm hoping is to provoke those conversations between people,
so that if you think it's scary,
do something about it.
Because you may think you have nothing to hide but
you might not actually know.
You don't necessarily know what your DNA says today,
and you don't know what your DNA might say ten years from now.
So really you don't know if you have anything to hide.