Making Home Saturday Series: Is Home Where the Body Is? (Session 1)

Join Cooper Hewitt for the next Making Home Saturday Series where we consider the hidden homes of our DNA with artist and biohacker Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

In Session 1, Dewey-Hagborg will discuss her installation and soundtrack for Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, which explores the architectural and cultural footprint of so-called “biobanks.” Filled with biological samples routinely collected at hospitals and medical centers, biobanks house and preserve our medical specimens for public and private research, often conducted with minimal informed consent. Dewey-Hagborg will tell the story of her own investigative efforts to discover her “blood spot card”—the blood drawn at birth from every newborn to be screened for disorders. This program shares a more scientific interpretation of home, inviting participants to ponder how these repositories store genetic and health information on millions of Americans.

After her presentation, Dewey-Hagborg will be joined by biologist Katayoun Chamany for a brief conversation addressing the potential lives of our DNA at the intersection of surveillance, cutting-edge science, privacy, and legal and ethical concerns.

SPEAKERS

Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a New York-based artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Dewey-Hagborg has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and SFMOMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Artforum and Wired. Dewey-Hagborg has a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is an Artist-in-Residence at the Exploratorium and is an affiliate of Data & Society. She is a founding board member of Digital DNA, a European Research Council funded project investigating the changing relationships between digital technologies, DNA, and evidence.

Katayoun Chamany is the Mohn Family Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and Professor of Biology in the Interdisciplinary Science program of Eugene Lang College and the Director of the Academic Science Labs at The New School. Trained as geneticist and cell biologist, she uses a STREAMD framework (STEM + Arts +Design+ Responsibility) to develop curricula that promotes ethical and responsible use of biotechnologies through provocation. As a Leadership Fellow for Science for New Civic Engagements and Social Responsibilities (SENCER), she designed the open access Stem Cells Across the Curriculum in collaboration with colleagues in the humanities, social sciences, policy, and design. For her contributions and leadership she has received The New School Distinguished University Teaching Award and University Social Justice Teaching Award, the Eugene Lang College Excellence In Faculty Advising Award, the William E. Bennett Award for Extraordinary Accomplishments in Citizen Science from SENCER, and the John A. Moore Award for Science as a Way of Knowing from the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996.