From our friends at Discard Studies a post about a surveillance based art project
In her much-lauded series Stranger Visions, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates busts from discarded genetic material collected in public places. It began sitting in a therapists office here in New York City, where she saw a hair lodged in a piece of furniture. “I stared at it for an hour,” she says. “I couldn’t stop wondering who it belonged to, and what I could find out about that person.” (Science Magazine). Based on her reading of forensic DNA prototyping, she took 11 found hairs and tested their DNA in a genetics lab. She then built three dimensional masks of those people based on the information she received about eye color, geographical roots, sex, and other traits (though an exact facial reconstruction from such testing is not possible– that is the stuff of science fiction and CSI-style television shows).