How to See Like a Machine

Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cam­eras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies "say" about the world, he teaches us to ask what they "do" and where such images come from. Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this appar­ently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Barbican Centre, London. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and, in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.

1. Introduction 2. Invisible Images: Your Pictures are looking at you 3. Excavating AI 4. Machine Realism 5. Neural Activations 6. Society of PSYOPS 7. Archives of the Future 8. Conclusion 9. Acknowledgements