Trevor Paglen in 2018. He's speaking at the World Economic Forum. Applause is... lukewarm.
I caught Trevor Paglen last night here in Madrid. He gave a talk to support his exhibition, “Behold These Glorious Times!” It’s a video, a thundering big screen presentation drawn from the data sets used to train artificial intelligence applications. He gave a highly informative presentation on the historical evolution of artificial intelligence, from its hubristic claustrophobic 1960s academic workshopping to its present world-conquering ambitions.
Julia Kaganskiy is the curator. She worked some years at the New Museum, bringing along programs in the old building just south of the new one. (It was there just before the improvement, spending time sorting out videotapes from the MWF Video collection for the New Museum's XFR Statiom project -- now very old media indeed.)
Kaganskiy’s essay in the show handout cites the German filmmaker Harun Farocki's concept of "operational images" -- images made by machines for machines, images that are designed to perform tasks. (That prescient term, coined in 2000, now names both a research institute and a recent book.)
In his essay "Invisible Images", she cites Paglen’s description of an invisible world of visual culture, in which "machine imaging systems no longer merely represent the world but autonomously shape it". The looking and interpreting of images now is being done mainly by machines.
Artists’ engagement with AI has been principally in the field of images that we can see, i.e., DALL-E 2 and its cousins. Trevor trained as a geographer. His work is conceptually based. In his projects he tries to get behind the apps, not use them. He described his work as a “geographer of technology”.
"Getting started with Image Recognition and Convolutional Neural..."
For me it was a bit of deja vu. Paglen’s tutorial was the kind of thing one had to go through in the ‘90s-early ‘00s to understand WTF was up with the internet. All those white scientist men with their big mainframes seeking to overcome their social isolation… He spoke of ole Woody Bledsoe, who studied phrenology (of course) to develop facial recognition in the 1960s. Woody was working under CIA contract. (Of course.) His idea was to mock up a standard head and determine identities based on deviations from that.
Paglen detailed the story of “Eliza”, the first chatbot, who – wait, which – hooked its users in a way that we who now use similar bots to contact corporations find generally useless and infuriating. In the 1960s, however, the effect “Eliza” had on users was a rather creepy illustration of the Barthean “birth of the reader”.
Paglen clearly charts how the AI programs move from taxonomy to learning library. He discussed the development of the ImageNet database project (2009) which seeks to map all objects for machinic vision. Somewhat blind, as he pointed out, to the difference between the apples of, say, Cézanne and those of the Agrana corporation.
Vital to the procedures of the ongoing Big Scrape, Trevor alluded to the “click workers” who labor to remove the “horrible content” from these image sets. (One article on this topic is titled: 'Without Our Work, Facebook Is Unusable'; who cleans up your “friends” bedroom? Backyard gravesites?)
Facial data sets, he observed, were built on the faces of prisoners, using FBI and other PD databases. Who are we when this is how machines see us?
On the dystopian side, depending on how you look at it, or whether you stand to make money on it or not – Trevor repeated the claim that half of internet content is already AI generated. He called it "goop”. I have seen instances of this, chasing obscure vectors of content, but had no idea it was so widespread. How can you tell? For now, for text, by its descent into gibberish.
In the question period he envisioned a not-far-off moment when the articles you read are written and illustrated for you, each person receiving a different tailored version. Would this make us nostalgic for mass market mediocrity?
Other prospective nasties include AIs which watch you as you drive and modify your insurance premiums in real time.
All that aside – that is, to set aside the imperatives of late capitalism, surveillance capitalism, which rule us, and under which as Matt Christman channeling the late Mark Fisher observed, our desires and aspirations are “embedded in the quicksand of neoliberal subjectivities” – AI and the Matrix-ready machines which run it are an imperative field for artists to jump in and investigate.
Trevor Paglen is the Pablo Picasso of 21st century conceptual art.
LINKS:
Since being busted out of the center of Madrid, Medialab is re-animating under a new program head, Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa. Trevor's appearance is part of a series, "Synthetic Imaginaries" looking at "non-human agency". "Synthetic Imaginaries", curated by Julia Kaganskiy
https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/synthetic-imaginaries
For the wider arc of his work, here's Paglen talking with Eyal Weizman of Forensic Architecture, both great investigative artists --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvE-QoMGjck
Exhibition handout – Julia Kaganskiy, "Behold These Glorious Times! (¡Contemplad estos tiempos gloriosos!)" PDF Published on Dec 27, 2023
https://issuu.com/mataderomadrid/docs/programa_de_mano_trevor
Article she cites – Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, December 8, 2016
https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/
"Trevor Paglen: Invisible Images of Surveillance"; 12 min.
speaking at the World Economic Forum (wow!), 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijVTdSoZEC4
“Woodrow Bledsoe Originates Automated Facial Recognition”
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2126
"ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
ImageNet
The ImageNet project is a large visual database designed for use in visual object recognition software research
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet
VOA - Voice of America English News, "Content Workers in Africa Sue Facebook, Report Poor Work Conditions", July 11, 2023
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/content-workers-in-africa-sue-facebook-report-poor-work-conditions/7174986.html
Maggie Harrison Dupré, “Short Road to Nowhere: Huge Proportion of Internet Is AI-Generated Slime, Researchers Find Striking”, 1/19/2024
https://futurism.com/the-byte/internet-ai-generated-slime
Side note: Before his talk, Trevor recognized me from old ABC No Rio days. He introduced me to the young curators as an “OG”. In his student days, Trevor was involved in a SF self-organized anarchist punk venue, that was like a kind of sister to ABC No Rio. It had a geographic name, which I simply cannot recall. [Update -- Chris Pramas on FB tipped me to the place. It's Gilman Street. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/924_Gilman_Street] The punk scene of the ‘80s was national, international, with lots of travelers then as now.
“Alternative Voices: 1980s Punk San Francisco”
Photographs by Jeanne Hansen / Interviews and introduction by Jonah Raskin
Alternative Voices | San Francisco Public Library (sfpl.org)
Jello Biafra in 2018; icon of the San Francisco anarcho-punk music scene
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