TEL AVIV.- The CCA is presenting Trevor Paglen’s first exhibition in Israel. Paglen’s practice spans sending time capsules and satellites into outer space, providing footage for Citizenfour, the Oscar award-winning documentary about Edward Snowden, and creating a radioactive sculpture for the nuclear exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. The Guardian newspaper has called Paglen “one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects.”
Paglen’s recent research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and machine vision, i.e. how computers and other forms of technology can “see” and use visual data. On view at the CCA is Paglen’s newest video installation, Behold These Glorious Times!, which brings together hundreds of thousands of training images routinely used to teach technological devices to recognize objects, faces, expressions, and actions. The multitude of images seems to collapse distinctions between humans, machines, and nature. The soundtrack was composed by electronic musician Holly Herndon using libraries of voices created to teach AI networks how to recognize speech and other acoustic phenomena.
Trevor Paglen (born 1974 in Maryland, US; lives and works in Berlin) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection. The Smithsonian American Art Museum will present a mid-career retrospective of his work in the summer of 2018. He has had one-person shows at Secession, Vienna; the Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthall Oslo; and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. His work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Walker Art Center. He participated in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, the 2013 ICP Triennial and the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. He has received numerous awards, including the 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, and is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. He has written The Last Pictures, a critical compendium of his Creative Time project to launch an ultra-archival disc micro-etched with one hundred photographs into orbit; Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World; and I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World. Paglen’s article “Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You” about computer vision and artificial intelligence was published by The New Inquiry in December 2016.
