Now on air: Ouvir Imagens, my column on Rádio USP. This weekly column airs Mondays at 8 a.m. It remains available online and can be accessed anytime, anywhere.
Taking Women’s Day as my starting point, the debut discusses new gender politics. I begin by introducing artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. She uses DNA analysis and 3D printing to question the ideological manipulation of genetics, as in Probably Chelsea, one of her latest works, an installation about Chelsea Manning.
For those who do not recall, Chelsea Manning is a transgender activist and former US Army intelligence analyst. Assigned male at birth and then named Bradley Edward Manning, she was responsible for leaking the documents published by WikiLeaks in 2010 in the Cablegate scandal. Today she advocates for transgender rights and government transparency.
On the 15th, the two will participate in a discussion about artificial intelligence and its social implications at the University of Michigan, which will later be made available online as a video. Their collaboration began in 2013.
While Chelsea was imprisoned, no images of her circulated apart from an old, faded photograph of her face. Heather Dewey-Hagborg decided to recover this absent body and create her portrait from Chelsea’s own DNA, sent to the artist from prison. The process resulted in 30 portraits.
Their production involved algorithmically manipulating Chelsea Manning’s genetic code. The consequences are deeply unsettling: from the data extracted from her DNA emerges a surprising variety of faces in terms of color, gender and physical appearance.
Presented together, modeled through 3D printing, they resemble masks. Enigmatic, they raise questions about the politics of image production in an age of surveillance that combines biometric governance with the possibility of designing bodies.
Learn more about Probably Chelsea by Heather Dewey-Hagborg