Trevor Paglen: Signature, Site, Metadata

Mar 24 - 27, 2021
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  • Trevor Paglen’s oeuvre has been an unparalleled investigation into the nature of art, images, and the politics and aesthetics of vision. Over two decades of work, he has circumnavigated the earth to track and photograph secret prisons, surveillance satellites, and classified drones, plumbed the depths of the ocean to find submerged internet cables, launched two satellites into orbit, and picked apart artificial intelligence systems to show the deeply troubling principles and concepts upon which many of them are founded.  

     

    Signature, Site, Metadata is an exploration of the various threads in his work over the last two decades, uncovering connections between such seemingly diverse topics as covert military and intelligence operations, artificial intelligence, mass incarceration, 19th Century landscape photography, “smart” weapons, and mass data collection. Shown together, the works in this collection point to the various ways that the history of image-making and it’s mechanization is one not only of aesthetics, but of politics and power. 

     

    Everywhere in Signature, Site, Metadata, images are not what they appear to be. In A Standard Face, Paglen has drawn a simple almost cubist-type take on a portrait. But motivation for the drawing is not self-evident: it is in fact, a reconstruction of a mathematical model of a face developed by researchers working for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s to invent modern facial recognition technology. Similarly, in Untitled (Reaper Drones), a photograph appears to depict deep red clouds just before a desert sunrise. On closer inspection, however, several Reaper-type combat drones reveal themselves to be present in the skyscape (Paglen created this series of images by photographing the skies outside desert drone bases with large-format cameras). These sorts of reversals and reveals are everywhere in Paglen’s work: an urban street scene is the site of an American “black site” in Kabul; a piece entitled We is created using hundreds of examples of a handwritten preamble to the American Constitution that have been harnessed to train AI systems how to read human handwriting; a photograph of the spring bloom bursts with color that turns out to have been created by a computer vision system analyzing the formal structure of the photograph to dissect the various objects and textures into their component parts; a massive wall piece consisting of more than 3,000 gelatin silver prints of prisoner mugshots is created from one of the foundational sets of images used in facial recognition technology. 

     

    Paglen’s work suggests that seeing is never “neutral” and that the meanings of images are never self-evident. His provocations have never been more urgent, as the advent of mechanized forms of vision - facial recognition, computer vision, and artificial intelligence - increasingly use cameras and automated image-interpretation to surveil and influence our everyday lives. 

     

    As the world attempts to reckon with systemic racism, patriarchy, and other forms of systemic oppression, Paglen’s work on the politics of images, their interpretations, and their uses is as urgent as it is consequential.

    • Trevor Paglen A Standard Face, 2020 Ink on paper 22 x 18 in 55.9 x 45.7 cm
      Trevor Paglen
      A Standard Face, 2020
      Ink on paper
      22 x 18 in
      55.9 x 45.7 cm
  • “The first work on automated facial recognition was funded by the American CIA in the early 1960s and led by an early pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence named Woody Bledsoe. Despite the fact that much of Bledsoe’s research was classified Top Secret, many of the techniques he developed would become standards in the fields of facial recognition and AI.

     

    Bledsoe’s approach to facial recognition were inspired by measurement techniques employed by early 20th Century physiognomists such as Cesare Lombroso and Samuel Morton, which Bledsoe adopted in his attempt to use computers to recognize individual faces. Bledsoe’s technique relied on the construction of a ‘standard head’ – a mathematical model to represent a generic head – based on measurements of the faces of people working in his lab. He used that standard head as a benchmark against which to measure other faces. Going back to Bledsoe’s original research, I reconstructed his ”standard head” from information left behind in his archives at the University of Texas and provided to me by Prof. Stephanie Dick, who studies Bledsoe’s legacy.

     

    This is a drawing of the mathematical abstraction of a human face that Bledsoe used in his experiments. Bledsoe’s company, Panoramic Research, conducted other work on behalf of the CIA including work on the CIA’s experiments with LSD and mind control under the code name MK-Ultra.” 

     

    - Trevor Paglen

  • In 2010, Paglen's interest in machine vision led him to document drone test flights in the desert of Nevada. The...

    In 2010, Paglen's interest in machine vision led him to document drone test flights in the desert of Nevada. The resulting images capture nearly undetectable surveillance drones in a seemingly empty field of clouds. Paglen's images are both documents of clandestine military operations and a contribution to the history of photographic abstraction, following in the tradition of Alfred Stieglitz's landmark Equivalents series of imposing clouds against a darkened sky. In Paglen's photographs, the sky is not abstract, but rather a politicized landscape populated by a new form of mechanized vision.

  • “With the beginning of the so-called War on Terror in the early 2000s, the CIA set up a network of secret prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Hundreds of “ghost prisoners” went through this system of extrajudicial disappearance and imprisonment. The black sites became synonymous with torture. The locations of the secret prisons remain some of the CIA’s most closely-guarded secrets.

     

    In 2006 I travelled to Afghanistan to research and photograph CIA black sites. The site shown here was brought to my attention by Afghan journalists and human rights activists in Afghanistan. The code name of this second site remains unknown.”    

     

    - Trevor Paglen

  • 'Contemporary facial-recognition algorithms were first properly researched in the early 1990s. To conduct that research, computer scientists and software engineers...
     
     

    "Contemporary facial-recognition algorithms were first properly researched in the early 1990s. To conduct that research, computer scientists and software engineers need large collections of faces to experiment with and to use as performance benchmarks. Before the advent of social media, a common source of faces for this research and development came from mugshots of accused criminals and prisoners. Photos of prisoners are supplied by the American National Institute of Standards (the agency responsible for weights and measures) to researchers across the world developing facial recognition technologies. In a very real sense, facial recognition software is built upon the faces of the accused and the dead. 

     

    A large wall piece of training images is currently on view in the exhibition Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI and which was commissioned by the de Young Museum in San Francisco."

     

    - Trevor Paglen

  • Installation view of Trevor Paglen’s "They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead … (SD18)," 2019 in "Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI" at the de Young Museum, San Francisco
    • Trevor Paglen We..., 2020 Pigment print on archival paper 72 x 56 in 182.9 x 142.2 cm Edition of 3 plus 1 AP
      Trevor Paglen
      We..., 2020
      Pigment print on archival paper
      72 x 56 in
      182.9 x 142.2 cm
      Edition of 3 plus 1 AP
  • 'The source material for this piece comes from a 1989 dataset created by the American National Institute of Standards (NIST)....

    "The source material for this piece comes from a 1989 dataset created by the American National Institute of Standards (NIST). The dataset was meant to be used to 'teach' computers how to 'read' handwriting. To create the dataset, scientists at NIST asked high-school students in Bethesda Maryland to fill out a sheet with handwritten numbers, letters, and to write out the preamble to the American Constitution. The preamble from the constitution is thus transformed into a means by which computers are taught to 'learn' what humans are doing." 

     

    - Trevor Paglen

  • “This image shows a classified NSA satellite lurking among commercial communications satellites in a region of space called the geostationary...
     
     

    “This image shows a classified NSA satellite lurking among commercial communications satellites in a region of space called the geostationary belt, also known as the Clarke Belt. The geostationary belt is a narrow band of space where satellites orbit the earth at the same rate as the earth’s rotation, effectively ‘hovering’ in space over a fixed point on earth. This ring of space is primarily populated by communications satellites that facilitate phone and internet connections around the world. 

     

    On this print, the satellites appear as a line of small dots and short lines about one third up from the bottom of the image.”

     

    - Trevor Paglen

  • Trevor Paglen, "Seal Rocks Circle Hough Transform; Region Adjacency Graph; Speeded-Up Robust, Features; Watershed; Good Features to Track," 2020
  • 'This is a photograph that a lot more work went into getting right than I would have thought. The site...

    "This is a photograph that a lot more work went into getting right than I would have thought. The site itself isn't particularly difficult to get to - the Seal Rocks are just off the Cliff House on the north end of San Francisco's Ocean Beach. The photograph is a reference to a Carleton Watkins image from 1868. A few factors had to come together to make it all work. It had to be shot on an overcast day to get the kind of soft horizon and transition from the sea to the sky that I wanted. And it had to be a pretty long exposure to get the water to 'smooth' out. It took me a long time to figure this out - and with 8x10 film costing about $50 every time you take a picture - it cost at lot of money to make. I eventually had to get a neutral density filter for the 8x10 camera to 'slow' down the exposure time to get it closer to what it would have been for the less sensitive emulsions used in the 19th Century.

     

    The image is overlaid with computer vision algorithms designed to break the overall image into a series of regions and keypoints that make the image 'intelligible' to machine vision systems. These algorithms in particular are prominently used in 'smart' weapons systems and other robotics technologies."  

     

    - Trevor Paglen

  • "This photograph of the spring bloom has been analyzed by an AI system to look for the 'deep saliency' in the image. In other words, an AI system is 'looking' at the photograph and trying to determine what the different parts of the image are (i.e. different shapes, objects, textures, and tones). Essentially, we are looking at an AI system trying to dissect the photograph into its constituent parts. 

     

    The colors in the image represents the different self-similar regions that the AI detects. The colors are arbitrary - they don't represent colors as such so much as what the AI thinks the different parts of the image are."    

     

    - Trevor Paglen 

  • Trevor Paglen and Dennis Scholl in Conversation

    Friday, March 26, 2021
  • Trevor Paglen is an internationally acclaimed artist and geographer. Paglen's work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and...

    Trevor Paglen is an internationally acclaimed artist and geographer. Paglen's work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His most recent book, The Last Pictures, is a meditation on the intersections of deep-time, politics, and art. 

     

    Trevor Paglen has exhibited in numerous international museums, galleries and institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Barbican Centre, London; Prada Foundation Osservatorio, Milan; Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Kunstverein Hannover; Kunsthalle Winterthur; Frankfurter Kunstverein; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The MCA Chicago, and many others. He has also been included in the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; the 2012 Liverpool Biennial; the 2016 Venice Biennial of Architecture; the 9th Berlin Biennial; Manifesta: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art 2016, Zurich; The Gwangju Biennale, 2016 and 2018; and the 2019 Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, Romania. His work has appeared in The New York TimesThe Wall Street JournalThe New YorkerArtforumFriezeThe GuardianThe AtlanticBombOctoberWired and The New Inquiry in addition to many other publications. Paglen was the recipient of the 2016 Deutsche Borse Prize, 2018 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. He holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. Paglen’s work is concurrently on view in Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI at the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

  • For more information please contact Altman Siegel at info@altmansiegel.com or 415.576.9300.