Invisible (2014).
Plastic bottles,
packaging, water,
proprietary
chemicals,
DNA, chelators,
and DNA
preservation
molecules. Image
courtesy of the
artist.
work in this version, to attempt to highlight
more the play in the system, the interpretation
involved, by perhaps showing multiple different
possible faces derived from the same DNA.
JB: In your latest piece, Invisible, you offer a literal
spray-solution to the issue of genetic surveillance that
enabled you to create Stranger Visions. Available for
purchase at the New Museum, Invisible debuted in
June. How have the reactions to this piece been so far?
Are they what you expected?
HDH: This is another project where I see
what I’ve done so far as a kind of ‘phase 1’ in a
much larger work. Reactions have been good. It
is meant to provoke debate in a more pointed
way than Stranger Visions, so controversy is good.
With these two projects I think both an asset
and an impedance is the number of issues and
the complexity involved. None of these things
are simple or have obvious solutions. Biological surveillance alone unpacks into a whole
constellation of issues ranging from definitions
of identity, genetic determinism, and family to
social justice issues surrounding imprisonment
and DNA databases. So there is a lot going on
here! I see this whole area generally as my area
of research, and it’s what I will be digging into
in my dissertation (tentatively titled Reading DNA: Inter-
26
pretation, Identity, and New Forms of Surveillance).
JB: In your work you have also addressed ideas of
evolution and artificial intelligence. Can you talk a
bit about your piece Listening Post and what it?
HDH: Yes, I have been interested in these
ideas and more generally the pursuit of artificial intelligence since I learned about it as an
undergraduate. Philosophically I have always
found it really fascinating—the conceptions of
mind/brain/body, intelligence, creativity, and
ideas of these things being independent of their
substrate, meaning that intelligence could be a
property potentially assignable to any medium
capable of computing, from water, to Legos,
to silicon, and the brain. This interest is what
got me interested in these subjects as an undergrad, and as I became engaged with the actual
algorithms technically I started to become very
aware of the politics involved. It’s one thing to
read about an abstract idea in a textbook and
quite another to start thinking about where
these things are actually implemented and for
what purposes. So I quickly began to realize
that the purposes they were being put to were
primarily military or surveillan