"His aim is not to expose and edify as much as to confound and unsettle."
— The New Yorker
Trevor Paglen, They Watch the Moon, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.
“Paglen’s work in experimental geography has produced powerful insights into the photographic calibrations between the visible and the invisible”
— Pamela M. Lee, ArtForum
Trevor Paglen, The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas), Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.
Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Reaper Drone), Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Trevor Paglen prepares for a polar alignment of his telescope. Photo: Katy Raddatz/San Francisco Chronicle.
Constructing the unfamiliar and meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us
Trevor Paglen, Courtesy of the Artist
About the Residency
Artist Trevor Paglen developed his work The Last Pictures through years of research and consultation with leading philosophers, scientists, engineers, artists, and historians. While in residence at MIT, he worked with researchers Professor Karl. K. Berggren of the MIT Research Lab for Electronics, Associate Professor Brian L. Wardle from the Department of Aeronautics and Astr
Trevor Paglen has a chilling new show, &#;Hide the Real, Show the False&#;, at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) this summer. We talk to the US artist about PSYOPs and the dangers of AI.
What can people expect at your new show?
The show looks at PSYOPs, psychological and deception operations. I’ve been focusing on surveillance and the role that technology plays in our lives, looking at AI and computer vision and thinking about how machines have been trained to see and how that’s different to the way humans see.
The problem is that people are quite easy to manipulate.
I believe that we’re moving away from surveillance capitalism and into PSYOP capitalism, where the media we consume will be increasingly not only targeted at us, but generated for us by AI systems. And being done in a way that’s intended to manipulate us.
You find that frightening?
I think it’s terrifying! Based on an individual’s metadata history and all the information that’s been collected about them, turbocharged generative AI systems will generate media exclusively for them. The problem is that people are quite easy to manipulate, and there’s quite well-developed literature about how to do
Trevor Paglen
About
Trevor Paglen's work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award–winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. Paglen is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Economist, and Art Forum. Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Award in Paglen's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washingto
Trevor Paglen: Surveillance in Life and Art
Artist Trevor Paglen spoke last week in the Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series, and said his goal as an artist is to “help us see the historical moment we live in.” Paglen made a case that this is true for all art over time, no matter the time period, and showed examples from Turner to Rothko, leading up to present times.
And what exactly is the artist's role in the post-Snowden era? For Paglen, who contributed images to the film Citizen Four, what he wants from art are "things that help us see the historical moment that we live in." These include "new metaphors and new ways of seeing." Paglen, at home "in the artist's studio and the researcher's lab," has looked at the surveillience state that marks our lives, and from it has drawn questions, answers, and thought-provoking works of art
"What does surveillance look like?" is a question that informs Paglen's work. The answer is not always clear. It could resemble, Paglen noted, "bad powerpoint." First you have to find the satellites, machinery and hidden buildings, the underwater cables and landing sites. Sometimes the search even reveals poetry: did you know a group
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