Meet American artist Trevor Paglen and his ground-breaking work on AI and the technological systems shaping our world. “For most of my career, one of the big themes I’ve been trying to understand is our relationship with infrastructures and technologies. In other words, how do we change the landscapes around us? And in doing so, how do we change who we are?” Over the years, Paglen has investigated communication systems, surveillance systems, and technologies that we use to interact with each other. “Is AI going to take people’s jobs? Yes, absolutely. Is AI going to increase economic inequality? Yes, absolutely. We see the beginnings of that with what are essentially surveillance systems using AI. So, for example, your car spies on you, sends information about how carefully you drive and how closely you adhere to traffic laws to insurance companies who can then use that information to modulate how you pay your insurance.” “Now what is going to happen is that increasingly, the entities we interact with online will be generated for us individually. So right now, people have to make TikTok videos, and the algorithm curates them in order to capture our attention. In the very near future, those videos or that media will just be individually generated for us.” “We will increasingly live in a world where each of us will contain dramatically different world views. And this, of course, will amplify a lot of trends like polarization, political manipulation, and disinformation. I think that’s going to be far more dramatic than what people are imagining. And if so, I’m not sure how you have a concept like democracy.” Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. He holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul. He also participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen 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 several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award, and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2017, Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow.
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