Advances in forensic art explore and preserve our common humanity

Shaping a likeness

Smith is often asked the question, “How does one know, when creating a forensic likeness of a person, that it is accurate?”

In answer, she explains that forensic artists do validation studies of anatomical data and utilise medical imaging technologies. “Because of the developments in technology, I could now conceivably put you in a CT scanner, scan your head, and then segment the scan to separate hard tissue from soft tissue, and processing each set of data into virtual 3D models, a skull and a face surface. I would then hide the ‘face’ model so it doesn’t interfere with my study and do a ‘blind’ reconstruction of the skull using existing methods, and then compare my reconstruction with the 'real' face model using 3D mapping to check how accurate my initial reconstruction was, from a shape-based perspective. These studies are common — that’s how validation is done nowadays.”

Smith has studied the relationship between shape-based accuracy and likeness extensively. “If we know that the currently available methods are accurate within two millimetres for 70% of the facial surface, that’s pretty good. But it doesn’t mean that the shape model is necessarily recognisable.”

Forensic art is divided into two broad categories, that of the identification and depiction of both living and the deceased. "For living persons, artists are usually involved with developing composites of persons of interest from eyewitness memory," she says. "For the dead, artists reconstruct facial appearance to assist investigators when other conventional methods of identification such as fingerprints, dental and DNA aren't available."

Increasingly, the importance of secondary identifiers, such as clothing and personal effects, are understood to have huge value in complex contexts, so Smith might need to also reconstruct objects. "It is in the heritage space, where a historical person may be shown wearing garments or with artefacts informed by the archaeological record, this contextual reconstruction informs our understanding of an unknown individual’s personhood. There are many contexts in which one might need to identify an unknown person, yet it is unknown whether they are alive or dead.

"Creating age-progression images, such as those you might do for abducted children or fugitives who have disappeared for various reasons is the least scientific method. In such cases, there is a lot of guesswork involved.

“There are certain things, like juvenile facial growth and development, for which you have data from the maxillofacial field [relating to the mouth, jaw, face, and neck] to refer to. But the specifics of a particular face? There are so many differences, even with twins. Lifestyle can have a huge impact on how they've aged. Age progressions may be the least scientifically supported with the forensic art suite of techniques, but they play a critical role prompting people to remember these events and people, and leads can be called in decades later. This is work of long duration.”

Artist, curator, and collaborator

“By nature, as an artist, you don’t think in silos. You’re used to working across boundaries all the time. It turns out this is very novel for people who normally operate in spaces where their roles and responsibilities are super delineated.

“In my research, I came across the fantastic concept of the ‘pracademic’ in public administration, referring to the practitioner-academic. A pracademic is someone who understands and can function in two or more distinct environments with very different functions, thereby acting as a critical vector of knowledge exchange between them.

“Such a person has active knowledge of and experience in both academic research and practice. A successful pracademic needs to be trusted to be able to move within and between both these spaces.”

Smith prefers to look at art, her own and that of others, through the lens of curatorship.

“I normally make installation environments, or curate exhibitions. I also extend my interest in curatorship to how I approach my own work. I put together lots of different things in order to explore unexpected relationships and the meaning or knowledge that may be created when unrelated things are made to connect, or familiar things come together in unexpected permutations.”

Smith’s online artwork Speaking Likeness, which is also an artist’s book, anthologises the diversity of her community of practice, from a global perspective. This work was recently featured in an exhibition in Norway and is currently on display in Slovenia.

Broadening perspectives, crossing boundaries

In the 1950s, the British scientist and writer CP Snow created two broad categories into which knowledge can be divided: knowledge created in the humanities, and that created in the natural sciences.

Snow suggested that these two kinds of knowledge are irreconcilable — a view that Smith is actively working against. In her opinion, forensic art shows anew that Snow’s supposed opposites, his two ‘cultures’ or ‘worlds’, depend on a distinction that lacks merit. And yet, she points out, it is not uncommon for a scientist to ask whether forensic art is at all systematic, or for an artist to question how creative forensic art can truly be.

“A lot of the disparities come from disciplinary conventions. Certain disciplinary conventions within science rub people in the humanities or arts up the wrong way, and vice versa,” Smith explains. This clash in the criteria used in various disciplines can mean that a given forensic facial depiction is completely successful in the forensic space but not appreciated as art, she says.

Yet, in working with forensic art as practice — something that has been theoretically neglected from a sociocultural, science, and technology perspective — Smith has brought people from various disciplines together. In doing so, many scientists have revised their assumptions that forensic art is “not scientific enough”, and artists altered their opinion of forensic art as “lacking creativity”.

How forensic art functions within a space filled with numerous systemic disparities is in itself a field of research for Smith, one where the quality of the questions is continually adapted and fine-tuned.

Forensic art at a crossroads

In various kinds of forensic work, one is confronted with someone who has lost their identity through whatever circumstance. In this regard, Smith explains: “You can’t ever fully reinstate personhood, obviously, but it remains an ambition. With forensic imaging, you are trying to identify an individual, you’re not trying to create a type of person. This is where assumptions based on legacies of data derived from physical anthropology, or ‘race science’, need very careful re-assessment.

“There is a move among more progressive practitioners in the fields of biological and forensic anthropology towards rethinking the concept of ‘ancestry’ or ‘population affinity’, and towards not including it in biological profiles based on analysis of skeletal morphology. Biological sex also needs some critical reassessment, given that it may not accord with our gender identity or presentation. Yet, the convention is to only think in binary terms, and the forms we use to report this data don’t offer a third space. Today, we understand more about the complexity of our genetic heritage through DNA, but both scientific cultures and popular perceptions need to catch up and get attuned to the full spectrum of what it is to be human, of which scientific analysis is only a part.”

Technology, science, and art on equal footing

Technological and methodological advances enhance the scope and application of forensic art, which in turn enriches police work as well as heritage projects.

Smith explains that as a part of the Geomagic Freeform computerised sculpting system, she uses the Phantom Touch haptic arm. This articulated arm lets her control what she is doing on a screen, while feeling what she is doing as she sculpts. “The shape and contours of bone give us information, but that shape we understand through touch rather than sight. A lot of the information you have to get — grooves or depressions, or the bony bumps at the corner of an eye where the ligaments of the eyelid connect — is part of feature estimation methodology.

“It helps to have this haptic system for computer modelling because it offers a non-destructive way of working. It also means we never have to handle the actual specimen. For forensic cases, this is optimal to the preservation of the chain of evidence. The skull never needs to leave the lab. It is scanned, and then I get a 3D model of it. From an ethical perspective, I am not physically handling human remains. You would like to have the least amount of interaction possible with the actual remains, out of respect but also because it is no longer necessary.”

Forensic practice on two continents

Smith has looked at various international examples of how forensic art, both academically and in practice, might benefit people.

“A colleague at the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the USA does facial reconstruction training workshops in different American institutions, using actual cases. He has worked with cases from the New York Medical Examiner’s Office and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The reconstructions are made public at the conclusion of each workshop and, more often than not, at least one or two of the depicted persons are recognised. So, they use a skills-transfer opportunity to simultaneously generate publicity around unidentified people. I want to replicate this in our context, but getting access to the data is the first challenge.”

Compared to ours, American laws tend to have a more relaxed interjurisdictional relationship when it comes to applying forensic art to unknown decedent cases, Smith says. “For instance, the medical examiner’s office could simply clear or make skulls available for such use. The forensic art is practised in a controlled context, led by an expert. In South Africa, however, there’s a lot of fear surrounding mortal remains.”

When asked about the impact of tighter regulation in South Africa, Smith says: “I think there’s so often a lack of understanding within the biomedical ethics space. One of the principles in clinical research is the anonymisation of patient data. In the forensic identification space, however, we are working with already anonymised people who must no longer remain anonymous. We are trying to identify them, which is a requirement in our Inquest Act, as well as a basic human right.

“Often, it can lead to a very interesting conversation as we are ultimately trying to answer the opposite question: How can we ‘undo’ anonymisation in death? Taking into account the greater good, you can often argue that the benefits outweigh the risks, which is essentially what ethics tries to balance.”

Art that engages

“I’ve finally come to understand the connection between my forensic interest and my artistic or curatorial interests, which is that in order to properly care for bodies or objects, whether they’re human bodies or objects in a museum, you also have to understand and care for the systems that they pass through, or which are responsible for them. Proper care often involves doing work on these systems, and offering constructive interventions.

“Whether the context is that of the museum or the mortuary, objects and bodies have stories. I’m concerned with those people and things that have become somehow disconnected from their story.”

Interestingly, work in the forensic humanitarian action space may involve applying forensic (loosely, ‘for the law’) methods in a ‘counter-forensic’ way. “A counter-forensic approach entails using forensic methods against either current or previous governments or authorities, as a way to investigate unsolved criminal cases or the political wrongs of the past or the present.

“So much in forensic art is archivally driven, and the digital humanities have only begun to unlock it. Take heritage destruction in Syria or Afghanistan as an example. The 3D scanning of artefacts there may now be the only trace that exists of their heritage — the ghost of something, now made to exist differently in a new form, but at least there is a record.”

Broadening horizons

Smith has discussed advances in the field with Prof Sibusiso Moyo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation, and Postgraduate Studies at SU, given Moyo’s particular interest in how it could speak to work in the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking.

In this regard, Smith is also considering developing a database of synthetic faces that can be used to apply textures to models. “Otherwise, we have to photograph identifiable people to create these reference databases for feature shapes. The POPI Act, as well as research ethics around identifiable data, makes that quite complicated.

“A lot of the very sophisticated facial compositing software that is now available uses what is called ‘evolutionary algorithms’. When we see faces, we don’t encode them feature by feature. Our brains don’t work like that. We encode faces holistically. These software packages are corresponding more and more to our cognitive face processing and facial recall capacity.”

When using such software, Smith explains, one provides it with a very basic description of someone and then it brings up a gallery of similar-looking faces. “The two most like the person described to an officer are chosen, and these faces are then ‘bred’ together to create another array.

“If you iterate this process many times, it will produce a face very similar to the one someone has been describing. It is not just a case of adding eyes, a nose, and a mouth. The approach is holistic. Furthermore, the software has qualitative sliding scales that you can adjust for anger or health. You can also do animation because we don’t encode living faces as static and in frontal view, like in the bureaucratic convention of a passport photograph.”

A sense of urgency

Smith leaves little doubt that there is a dire need for forensic art skills internationally and also in South Africa. “This is only a back-of-the-envelope calculation because these statistics are not formally kept, but up to 10 000 people in our forensic medicolegal laboratories are left unidentified every year.”

There is a sense of urgency to her views on what needs to be done in terms of developing the field, given the societal implications we otherwise face.

“For one, we need to create jobs in the sector before we start offering any degree programmes. Right now, I am trying to generate as much exposure as possible by talking to academic and popular audiences and looking at ways we can build on existing research networks and projects locally, internationally, and in Africa.

“I recently returned from the 10th African Society of Forensic Medicine International Conference in Kigali. It was an extraordinary meeting, and our contributions were so warmly and well received. There is so much scope for developing forensic facial imaging in neighbouring African countries with some forensic infrastructure, especially in parallel with the extraordinary work of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the new African Centre for Medicolegal Systems.”

Ultimately, Smith sees connecting with and creating open lines of communication between various roleplayers as the first and most important task in the development of the field.

“Stakeholders across the board, from top SAPS officials to forensic officers within FPS who deal with the public, to social justice advocates, established academics, students interested in career pathways in the forensic sciences or art, and everything in between, need to be made aware of all that is at stake if we don’t pay attention to the unidentified bodies in our mortuaries.”

She quotes the statesman William Gladstone: “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.”