View transcript
 Probably Chelsea shows us 30 different portraits that are all derived from Chelsea Manning's DNA, so it's 30 different interpretations of the same DNA data. In 2014, I was contacted by Paper Magazine. They were conducting an interview with Chelsea Manning through the mail. And so at this point, Chelsea could not be visited and could not be photographed, and this is why they had to have an interview through the mail. And they were doing this interview, but they wanted some kind of picture to accompany it. And they contacted me because they'd seen my work working with strangers' DNA and creating these portraits from the profiles of strangers' DNA. And they thought so could I take Chelsea's DNA and kind of sneak her image out of the prison. Chelsea took two Q-Tips and swabbed the inside of her mouth and sent me hair clippings. And I walked through the same process I'd walked through with strangers to create a genetic profile from these items, and then used that to algorithmically predict different possible portraits of what she might look like based on that extracted DNA data. Chelsea Manning is the U.S. whistleblower who is known for making public the information that showed the prevalence and scope of civilian deaths and torture in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I learned how to extract DNA in a community laboratory called Genspace in Brooklyn. What I usually do is go through this process of extraction, and then you choose which parts of the DNA you wanna look at and perform what's called a polymerase chain reaction. So you amplify these subsections of DNA that you're interested in and then send those for sequencing. And then you get back basically a text file that tells you the A-T-Cs and Gs that are around this gene or region of interest. And from that you can create a kind of genetic profile of what this person's DNA looks like at these different regions that you're interested in. The DNA profile is fed into this custom software that I wrote. The custom software predicts different possible faces, and then it's 3D-printed at the full life-sized human scale in full color. So genomics is a predictive field. It's an attempt to make guesses about what kind of phenotype someone might have based on DNA. It's not ever a certainty, or really almost never at all a certainty. It creates this very open space, and you might be able for example to predict that someone has a 70% chance of having blue eyes, but then they also have a 20% chance of having brown eyes, a 10% chance of having green eyes. And so in Probably Chelsea, you can see that space kind of made physical across many different traits. Profiling data is always subjective. So whether it's genetic data or some other kind of data, when you build up a data profile of someone, it's always this kind of act of shaping the data. When Obama commuted Chelsea's sentence, we had an exhibition to celebrate her release from prison, and that's where Probably Chelsea premiered. She came and was able to see her portraits in person for the first time. It was really an amazing moment. So Probably Chelsea will be kind of front and center. When you enter the Cells to Self exhibition, the faces will greet you in a way and invite you in, and hopefully invite you into thinking deeply about genetics and your own identity. I hope that you'll walk up to these faces and identify with one of them, that there will be a face that you connect to and are drawn into, and that leads you to think, "That could be my DNA, "and how many different people "are there in my DNA, as well?"