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Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her DNA-derived self-portrait. Photo by Dan Phiffer.

It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of discarded chewing gum.

At 12:15 pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg collected a cigarette butt (above, right) on Myrtle Avenue (above, left) in Brooklyn, NY. Testing the sample’s DNA revealed the smoker to be a male of Eastern European descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Do you get strange looks? I ask, in a recent phone conversation. “Sometimes,” says Dewey-Hagborg. “But New Yorkers are pretty used to people doing weird stuff.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s odd habit has a larger purpose. The 30-year-old PhD student, studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects, focusing on specific genomic regions from her samples. She then sequences these regions and enters this data into a computer program, which churns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind.

It gets creepier.

From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures using a 3D printer. When she shows the series, called “Stranger Visions,” she hangs the life-sized portraits, like life masks, on gallery walls. Oftentimes, beside a portrait, is a Victorian-style wooden box with various compartments holding the original sample, data about it and a photograph of where it was found.

The portrait Dewey-Hagborg created based on the DNA sample from the cigarette butt collected on Myrtle Avenue. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used condoms. She tells me she has had the most success with cigarette butts. “They [smokers] really get their gels into that filter of the cigarette butt,” she says. “There just tends to be more stuff there to actually pull the DNA from.”

Also on January 6, 2013, but at 12:20pm, Dewey-Hagborg collected this cigarette butt (above, right) on the corner of Myrtle Avenue and Himrod Street (above, left) in Brooklyn. Testing revealed the smoker to be a female of European descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Dewey-Hagborg takes me step-by-step through her creative process. Once she collects a sample, she brings it to one of two labs—Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, or one on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (She splits her time between Brooklyn and upstate New York.) Early on in the project, the artist took a crash course in molecular biology at Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, where she learned about DNA extraction and a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). She uses standard DNA extraction kits that she orders online to analyze the DNA in her samples.

If the sample is a wad of chewing gum, for example, she cuts a little piece off of it, then cuts that little piece into even smaller pieces. She puts the tiny pieces into a tube with chemicals, incubates it, puts it in a centrifuge and repeats, multiple times, until the chemicals successfully extract purified DNA. After that, Dewey-Hagborg runs a polymerase chain reaction on the DNA, amplifying specific regions of the genome that she’s targeted. She sends the mitochondrial amplified DNA (from both mitochondria and the cells’ nuclei) to a lab to get sequenced, and the lab returns about 400 base pair sequences of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine (G, A, T and C).

The artist produced this facial reconstruction from her DNA analysis of the cigarette butt she collected at Myrtle Avenue and Himrod Street. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Dewey-Hagborg then compares the sequences returned with those found in human genome databases. Based on this comparison, she gathers information about the person’s ancestry, gender, eye color, propensity to be overweight and other traits related to facial morphology, such as the space between one’s eyes. “I have a list of about 40 or 50 different traits that I have either successfully analyzed or I am in the process of working on right now,” she says.

Dewey-Hagborg then enters these parameters into a computer program to create a 3D model of the person’s face.” Ancestry gives you most of the generic picture of what someone is going to tend to look like. Then, the other traits point towards modifications on that kind of generic portrait,” she explains. The artist ultimately sends a file of the 3D model to a 3D printer on the campus of her alma mater, New York University, so that it can be transformed into sculpture.

Five minutes later, at 12:25pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg obtained this piece of green chewing gum (above, right) on the corner of Wilson Avenue and Stanhope Street in Brooklyn. Testing revealed the chewer to be a male of Native American and South American descent with brown eyes. Photos courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—since the samples are from anonymous individuals, a direct comparison cannot be made. Certainly, there are limitations to what is known about how genes are linked to specific facial features.”We are really just starting to learn about that information,” says Dewey-Hagborg. The artist has no way, for instance, to tell the age of a person based on their DNA. “For right now, the process creates basically a 25-year-old version of the person,” she says.

That said, the “Stranger Visions” project is a startling reminder of advances in both technology and genetics. “It came from this place of noticing that we are leaving genetic material everywhere,” says Dewey-Hagbog. “That, combined with the increasing accessibility to molecular biology and these techniques means that this kind of science fiction future is here now. It is available to us today. The question really is what are we going to do with that?”

The artist created this portrait based on the DNA in the chewed gum. Image courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Hal Brown, of Delaware’s medical examiner’s office, contacted the artist recently about a cold case. For the past 20 years, he has had the remains of an unidentified woman, and he wondered if the artist might be able to make a portrait of her—another clue that could lead investigators to an answer. Dewey-Hagborg is currently working on a sculpture from a DNA sample Brown provided.

“I have always had a love for detective stories, but never was part of one before. It has been an interesting turn for the art to take,” she says. “It is hard to say just yet where else it will take me.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s work will be on display at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on May 12. She is taking part in a policy discussion at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on June 3 and will be giving a talk, with a pop-up exhibit, at Genspace in Brooklyn on June 13. The QF Gallery in East Hampton, Long Island, will be hosting an exhibit from June 29-July 13, as will the New York Public Library from January 7 to April 2, 2014.

Editor’s Note: After getting great feedback from our readers, we clarified how the artist analyzes the DNA from the samples she collects.

Terminal Mirage 2, 2003. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE

For almost 30 years, David Maisel has been photographing areas of environmental degradation. He hires a local pilot to take him up in a four-seater Cessna, a type of plane he likens to an old Volkswagen beetle with wings, and then, anywhere from 500 to 11,000 feet in altitude, he cues the pilot to bank the plane. With a window propped open, Maisel snaps photographs of the clear-cut forests, strip mines or evaporation ponds below.

American Mine (Carlin NV 2), 2007. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE

The resulting images are beautiful and, at the same, absolutely unnerving. What exactly are those blood-red stains? As a nod to the confusing state they place viewers in, Maisel calls his photographs black maps, borrowing from a poem of the same title by contemporary American poet Mark Strand. “Nothing will tell you / where you are,” writes Strand. “Each moment is a place / you’ve never been.”

The Mining Project (Butte MT 3), 1989. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE

Maisel’s latest book, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, is a retrospective of his career. It features more than 100 photographs from seven aerial projects he has worked on since 1985. Maisel began with what Julian Cox, the founding curator of photography at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, calls in the book an “extensive investigation” of Bingham Canyon outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. His photographs capture the dramatic layers, gouges and textures of the open-pit mine, which holds the distinction of being the largest in the world.

This series expanded to include other mining sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Montana, until eventually Maisel made the leap from black and white to color photography, capturing the bright chemical hues of cyanide-leaching fields in The Mining Project (a selection shown above). He also turned his lens to log flows in Maine’s rivers and lakes in a project called The Forest and the dried bed of California’s Owens Lake, drained to supply Los Angeles with water, in The Lake Project.

Oblivion, as the photographer describes on his personal Web site, was a “coda” to The Lake Project; for this series of black and white photographs, reversed like x-rays, Maisel made the tight network of streets and highways in Los Angeles his subject—see an example below. Then, in one of his most recent aerial endeavors, titled Terminal Mirage (top), he photographed the Mondrian-like evaporation ponds around Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Oblivion 2N, 2004. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE

All combined, Maisel’s body of work is what Cox calls “a medley of terrains transformed by humankind to serve its needs and desires.” The narrative thread, he adds in the introduction to Black Maps, is the photographer’s aim to convey humans’ “uneasy and conflicted relationship with nature.”

I wrote about Maisel’s photography for Smithsonian in 2008, when his “Black Maps” exhibition was touring the country, and at that time, the Long Island, New York-native hedged from being called an “environmental activist.” As Cox astutely notes, “The photographs do not tell a happy story,” and yet they also “do not assign any blame.” Maisel is attracted to these landscapes because of their brilliant colors, eye-catching compositions and the way they emote both beauty and danger.

The Lake Project 20, 2002. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE

Maisel’s photographs are disorienting; it is a mental exercise just trying to orient oneself within the frame. Without providing solid ground for viewers to stand on, the images inevitably spark more questions than they do answers.

Each one is like a Rorschach test, in that the subject is, to some extent, what viewers make it to be. Blood vessels. Polished marble. Stained-glass windows. What is it that you see?

An exhibition of Maisel’s large-scale photographs, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, is on view at the CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder, through May 11, 2013. From there, the show will travel to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it will be on display from June 1 to September 1, 2013.

ZnO Fall Flowers. Image by Audrey Forticaux, a graduate student in the Chemistry Department.

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”

—Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician (1854-1912)

Earlier this month, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced the winners of its 2013 Cool Science Image contest. From an MRI of a monkey’s brain to the larva of a tropical caterpillar, a micrograph of the nerves in a zebrafish’s tail to another of the hairs on a leaf, this year’s crop is impressive—and one that certainly supports what Collage of Arts and Sciences believes at its very core. That is, that the boundary between art and science is often imperceptible.

Zebrafish neural network. Image by Pui-ying Lam, a graduate student studying cellular and molecular biology. A fluorescent molecule makes the neurons in the tail of a live zebrafish visible.

The Why Files, a weekly science news publication put out by the university, organizes the contest; it started three years ago as an offshoot of the Why Files’ popular “Cool Science Image” column. The competition rallies faculty, graduate and undergraduate students to submit the beautiful scientific imagery produced in their research.

Brain image. Image by Christopher Coe, a faculty member in the Psychology Department. This image of a monkey’s brain was created, thanks to an MRI technique called diffusion tensor imaging.

“The motivation was to provide a venue and greater exposure for some of the artful scientific imagery we encounter,” says Terry Devitt, the coordinator of the contest. “We see a lot of pictures that don’t get much traction beyond their scientific context and thought that was a shame, as the pictures are both beautiful and serve as an effective way to communicate science.”

Middle Earth. Image by Sheryl A. Rakowski, senior research specialist in the Bacteriology Department. Slime mold, which typically live as single-celled amoebae, create “flash mobs” when faced with a food shortage. These flash mobs meld into multicellular organisms.

Most of the time, these images are studied in a clinical context, Devitt explains. But, increasingly, museums, universities and photography contests are sharing them with the public. “There is an ongoing revolution in science imaging and there is the potential to see things that could never before be seen, let alone imaged in great detail,” says Devitt. “It is important that people have access to these pictures to learn more about science.”

Air Sea Interaction. Image by Rick Kohrs, senior instrument technician at the Space Science and Engineering Center. Superstorm Sandy is colliding with the East Coast of the United States in this image of water vapor and sea surface temperatures from October 28, 2012.

This year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s scientific community entered 104 photographs, micrographs, illustrations and videos to the Cool Science Image contest—a number that trumps last year’s participation by about 25 percent. The submissions are judged, quite fittingly, by a cross-disciplinary panel of eight scientists and artists. The ten winners receive small prizes (a $100 gift certificate to participating businesses in downtown Madison) and large format prints of their images.

Trichomes. Image by Emily Kief, undergraduate student, Botany Department. This scanning electron micrograph shows growths, or trichomes, on a leaf.

“When I see an image I love, I know the second I see it. I know it because it is beautiful,” says Ahna Skop, a judge and geneticist at the university. She admits she has a bias for images capturing nematode embryos and mitosis, her areas of expertise, but like many people, she also gravitates to images that remind her of something familiar. The scanning electron micrograph, shown at the top of this post, for example, depicts nanoflowers of zinc oxide. As the name “nanoflower” suggests, these chemical compounds form petals and flowers. Audrey Forticaux, a chemistry graduate student at UW-Madison, added artificial color to this black and white micrograph to highlight the rose-like shapes.

Hoodia. Image by Mo Fayyaz, distinguished faculty associate, Botany Department. A macroscopic view of the center of a hoodia flower—a succulent native to South Africa and Namibia.

Steve Ackerman, an atmospheric scientist at the university and a fellow judge, describes his approach: “I try to note my first response to the work—am I shocked, awed, baffled or annoyed?” He is bothered when he sees meteorological radar images that use the colors red and green to depict data, since they can be difficult for color blind people to read. “I jot down those first impressions and then try to figure out why I reacted that way,” he says.

Lunaria annua. Image by Kata Dosa, graduate student, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. The seeds of Lunaria annua can be seen through the plant’s translucent seed pods. In fact, you can even see the umbilical cord-like structure, called a funiculus, that connects the seed to the placenta.

After considering artistic qualities, and the gut reactions they trigger, the panel considers the technical elements of the entries, along with the science they convey. Skop looks for a certain crispness and clarity in winning images. The science at play within the frame also has to be unique, she says. If it is something that she has seen before, the image probably won’t pass muster.

Automeris banus. Image by Peggy Boone, graduate student, Zoology Department. This moth, in its larva form, stung Boone when she encountered it in Mexico’s Palenque National Park. Nonetheless, with a swollen hand, the field biologist managed to capture this photograph.

Skop hails from a family of artists. “My father was a sculptor and my mother a ceramicist and art teacher. All of my brothers and sisters are artists, yet I ended up a scientist,” she says. “I always tell people that genetically I’m an artist. But, there is no difference between the two.”

Beta catenin. Image by Vastal Mehta, research associate in the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Comparative Biosciences. This micrograph shows a cluster of cells in a transgenic mouse, exhibiting high levels of beta catenin, a protein that plays a role in prostate development.

If anything, Skop adds, the winning entries in the Cool Science Image contest show that “nature is our art museum.”

April 4, 2013: Taylor Swift, by Klari Reis.

For all 94 days of 2013 thus far, Klari Reis has kept to her resolution. The San Francisco-based artist has posted a new petri dish painting—eye candy for any sci-art lover—to her blog, The Daily Dish.

Reis’ circular art pieces are explosions of color. The yellows, pinks, purples, greens, oranges, reds and blues in the paintings take on a smattering of different shapes, including amorphous blobs, radiating fireworks and wavy veins that resemble, quite intentionally on Reis’ part, what a scientist might see when gazing through a microscope. The artist gives her creations playful names, little quips, really, that spring to mind when she looks at the designs. Blueberry Pie. That One Time in the 80′s. Peachy Keen. Jellyfish with a Brooch. Absinthe on the Rocks.

Just yesterday, she introduced Taylor Swift—a flower-like pattern in lemon yellow. (Check it out, above.)

April 3, 2013: Milk Spilled on the Gold Streets of Heaven, by Klari Reis.

The project, though begun in earnest this year, has been a long time coming. Reis, now in her mid-30s, was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease more than a decade ago. Shortly after her diagnosis, she left a stressful job as an architect in San Francisco to pursue a career in fine art. While studying at City and Guilds of London Art School, she was in and out of the hospital, trying to wrap her head around the differences between medications she was being prescribed in the United Kingdom and those she had been given in the United States. “I knew I was allergic to this one medicine in the U.S., but they called it something different in the U.K.,” says Reis. “So, I just felt like it was pretty important for me to understand what these drugs really were and what they did on the inside.”

April 2, 2013: Stars Hugging After a Long Day, by Klari Reis.

In 2002, Reis’ doctor at St. Thomas’ Hospital, a teaching hospital connected to King’s College, invited her to his lab. There, under a microscope, he showed her dozens of samples of her blood reacting to different medicines. Intrigued with the cellular reactions she saw, particularly how cells morph and duplicate when different influences enter the body, Reis began painting some of the imagery on canvas and wood and aluminum panels, by memory. “My first 100 paintings were all named after different drugs,” she says. “They weren’t exact replicas of what I saw under the microscope, but were very much inspired by it.”

April 1, 2013: Abstraction of Daisies, by Klari Reis.

After three years in London, Reis returned to San Francisco, where she continued to work at the intersection of art and science. Several biotech companies in the Bay area granted her access to their labs and commissioned educational paintings from her, depicting pharmaceuticals in action. But, then about four years ago, in what she describes as a very natural progression, Reis branched away from this work, and away from canvas, wood and aluminum, to create paintings within actual petri dishes.

March 31, 2013: Chihuahua Love, by Klari Reis.

“What I like about what I do is that it is different,” says Reis. “I use unconventional materials.”

Reis starts with a petri dish, one of three sizes of dishes she purchases from a biotech supply company. The smallest dishes are about three inches in diameter. The medium-sized dishes, standard in high school science labs, measure 4.5 inches, and the largest ones are about six inches across. Then, wearing a mask and a biohazard suit, she heats up epoxy polymer—a shiny plastic medium found not at an art store but at a place like Home Depot because it is often mixed with cement to create flooring (she was first exposed to the product during her days as an architect)—and adds color to it using powders and industrial dyes. Once the plastic is a syrupy consistency, she applies between three and five layers within a petri dish. Reis has become looser and more abstract in her designs, but they still call to mind cultures of bacteria growing in petri dishes.

March 30, 2013: Nappy Hues of Pink, by Klari Reis.

Just when you think Reis may have exhausted her options, she unveils a delightful new design. Each petri dish is remarkably different. ”I feel like there are endless possibilities,” says Reis.

March 29, 2013: The Color Purple, by Klari Reis.

“What does the next one look like?” I ask, hoping for an inside scoop on the next dish to hit her blog.

“Ah,” Reis says, “You’ll have to wait and see.”

Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io, is extremely volcanic. “If you look closely on the upper left and upper right horizon, you can see eruptions in the process of happening,” says Benson. “We know that at least 400 volcanos are continuously blasting magma into space from Io.” Mosaic composite photograph. Galileo, July 3, 1999. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

At the outset of both his new book, Planetfall, and his exhibition of the same title now at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, photographer Michael Benson defines the word “planetfall.” Planetfall, he states, is “the act or an instance of sighting a planet after a space voyage.”

It is really the existence, in the last 50 years, of spacecraft orbiting the planets of our solar system that has necessitated the term. “Each of these far-flung machines is following the traditions blazed by the great Earthbound explorers, but when its destination comes into view, we can no longer call that dramatic moment ‘landfall,’” according to the exhibition. “Hence ‘planetfall’—the moment of arrival at other worlds.”

In his latest series of images, Benson attempts to lift us off terra firma and bring this awe-inspiring moment to us. His 40 large-scale photographs, hanging in the AAAS Art Gallery, are remarkably crisp views of the rings of Saturn, moons in transit, a sunset on Mars and volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon, Io, among other marvels. Each image is in “true color,” as Benson puts it.

To make his photographs, Benson starts by perusing through thousands of raw image data collected on missions led by NASA—Cassini, Galileo, MESSENGER, Viking and Voyager, among others—and the European Space Agency. He has compared this process to panning for gold—the precious gold nuggets being beautiful sequences of images, rarely seen by the public, that he can piece together into one seamless photograph. It can take anywhere from tens to hundreds of raw frames to arrange, like a mosaic, one legible composite image. Then rendering the photograph in realistic colors adds another layer of complexity. Benson describes the process in his book:

“In order for a full-color image to be created, the spacecraft needs to have taken at minimum two, but preferably three, individual photographs of a given subject, with each exposed through a different filter…. Ideally, those filters are red, green, and blue, in which case a composite image color image can usually be created without too much trouble…. If a red and a blue filtered shot are available but not a green, for example, a synthetic green image can be created by mixing the other two colors.”

Uranus and its rings. Mosaic composite photograph. Voyager, January 24, 1986. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Some of the colors are quite striking. Jupiter’s moon, Io, is a brilliant yellow, in one of Benson’s photographs (shown at top). To me, it looks like a shiny bowling ball, whereas for Benson it calls to mind the yellow rim of Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone National Park. “It’s all sulphur,” he says. Then, there is the photographer’s very modernist-looking portrait of Uranus (above) and its rings in a stunning robin’s egg blue, assembled from raw images taken by the Voyager spacecraft as it flew by the planet on January 24, 1986. Uranus’ rotation axis is roughly parallel to the plane of the solar system, making its rings vertical in this view. ”This is about as close, I believe, to what the human eye would see as it is possible to produce using existing data,” Benson explains.

The sights take some time to digest. At a recent preview of the AAAS exhibition, I watched as onlookers approached the photographs, oriented themselves with their subjects and tried to make sense of the shadows, streaks and gouges they saw. As TIME reported on its blog, LightBox, “Benson’s visions demand more than a single look; the longer one spends with his vast landscapes, considering the scale and scope, the more they facilitate a state of meditation.”

Meditate on these selections from Planetfall, on display at the AAAS Art Gallery through June 28, 2013.

Saturn with Mimas. Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, as seen against the shadows cast by the planet’s rings onto its northern hemisphere. Cassini, November 7, 2004. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Saturn, Mimas and Tethys. Mosaic composite photograph. Cassini, July 16, 2005. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Sun on the Pacific. The view seen from the International Space Station at an altitude of 235 miles. ISS 007 crew, July 21, 2003. Credit: NASA JSC/ISS 07 crew/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Transit of Io. The volcanic moon passes across the face of Jupiter. Mosaic composite photograph. Cassini, January 1, 2001. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Eclipse of Sun by Earth. Ultraviolet exposure, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Apri 2, 2011. Credit: NASA GSFC/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Galileo, June 27, 1996. Credit: NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Crescent Neptune and its largest satellite, Triton. Mosaic composite photograph. Voyager 2, August 31, 1989. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.

Enceladus Vents Into Space. Saturn’s moon Enceladus geysers water into space from its south polar region. Mosaic composite photograph. Cassini, December 25, 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures.