Last night I went down to the art and security meetup at NYU’s ITP.

We saw three rad projects.

1. Heather Dewey-Hagborg collects hair and cigarette butts from subway, streets in Williamsburg. She goes to Genspace, a bio hacking space in downtown Brooklyn to perform PCR and gel electrophoresis, etc. Sends off to get these DNA sets sequenced for specific phenotypic traits. Stuff like mitochondrial maternal region indicators ( ethnicity), eye color, hair color, freckles,  etc.

Then she runs code against these to generate 3D models of how they might look. Prints those out using a full color 3d printer.

Great discussion about implications and the private or public nature of DNA vs its uses. We compared to browser DNA identified by EFF, ways  government should regulate both. Also, how little we generally know about our own DNA.

2. Glenn Wester is trying to create true heads up display for augmented reality. He points out that all current AR hardware uses screens that block your vision. You don’t look at really augmented, you look at a picture of reality that is augmented.

He wants something more like a fighter jet heads up display. This involves having a tiny oled project onto a 45 deg angled beam splitter mirror. Sort of like your basic haunted house ghost room effect, but mounted to your head.

Here is me wearing it.

It works and is really cool. We tried to figure out ways to hack it, like getting light off of your clothes or trying to read reflections on your eyes, but nothing so far. Very cool if still unfashionable. I wondered if you could combine a dimmed laser picoprojector and fiber to get a low res display with less bulk up top.  Amazingly, all of this costs around a hundred bucks.

3. Jordan Seiler presented his work removing outdoor advertising from towns. Some of this is physical work, and some is using AR.

He was VERY excited about the presentation from 2. We talked about analogues between his work and Add-Art. We got into who has the right to determine what you look at ( this is part of what underlies the justification for some graffiti). That led into wondering how folks might use AR for nefarious purposes. I brought up the possibility of racists editing out the looks of other people in the same way that buildings are treated. Jeff Crouse’s underdeveloped Unlogo Project came up as well, but we had a devil of a time remembering the name of the project.

At the end, Kyle invited folks to go see his amazing face substitution work at Eyebeam.