Portrait, with Data
By: Mrs Smith
Tags: Ideas, Identity, Data Visualization, Future

In the new gilded age of the twenty-first century artists are once again returning to rendering hyper-detailed, highly technical visions of the movers and shakers of our times. Image is everything. This time though, the stakes are a little different. Our digital lives have become the historical record that defines us, often without our explicit consent. As we toil away at being born, going to school, getting jobs, buying things and creating ever more data, the gods and goddesses of the digital world are curating their full-blooded portraits in a way that would make Sargent nod with glowing appreciation.

In her book, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014) Judith Donath defines data portraits as “depictions of people made by visualizing data by and about them.” Unlike portraits of the past, data portraits don’t require direct human interaction between the artist who is creating the work, and the subject. It has become quite easy to craft an image of an individual by accessing their personal data, with, or without their permission.

DNA ‘portraits’ from Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions project (2012)

Take, for example Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Stranger Visions project. Finding and documenting found objects in the street, such as, hair, cigarette butts and chewing gum, Dewey-Hagborg extracted samples of DNA from those objects and sequenced it to sort for information about eye and hair color, ancestry and gender. Using specialized software, a digital facial approximation was produced from the genetic information, then fed to a 3D printer to make a portrait based solely on the DNA samples’ probable ratios. How accurately those portraits represent the people whose DNA was taken is not known. Through her work, Dewey-Hagborg asks us to become more aware of the use of biological surveillance and its growing impact on the increasingly fuzzy legal definitions of data ownership and indirectly, the potentially inaccurate representations that our personal data may offer about us.

Which one is the real Justin Beiber?

A different case is that of Justin Beiber’s Calvin Klein underwear ads. After images were initially released from an early 2015 photo shoot, a second image of The Beibs was released, purportedly an original, un-retouched image. The truth actually lay somewhere in the middle, in that the “un-retouched” version was an equally manipulated image made to show Bieber as less muscular and well-endowed than can be clearly seen in his own personal Instagram. Since photoshopping even Instagram images is fairly common, especially amongst celebrities, it seems clear the only way to determine Beiber’s genuine physique is to see him in the flesh, perhaps optimally in his Calvins.

Unfortunately, it is not only representations of our images which are being appropriated and used without our consent, and it isn’t just artists who wish to describe us to the world at large. Almost everyone has a credit score, which is a portrait in many ways, one, which in most cases, we haven’t any real control over. What do you look like to your bank, your mortgage lender or your potential employer? All of them have access to your data, and can create a story about your life, behaviors and practices based on their predictive models, which may, or may not be accurate to you.

What Crystal has to say about “Susan.” Would you agree?

Crystal, is a new app which “analyzes public data to tell you how you can expect any given person to behave, how he or she wants to be spoken to, and perhaps more importantly, what you can expect your relationship to be like.” Crystal uses algorithms to discern personality traits from a person’s communication style in their LinkedIn profile, emails or other public messages. Is it accurate? Who knows, but there are probably plenty of people who will defer to its algorithmic logic in preference over actual human interaction. Will we now have to become more responsive to algorithms, trying to guess which of our traits we most need to modify to present a more pleasing (or engineered) countenance?