Behold These Glorious Times!

2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10:02 minutes

Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e. how computers and other forms of technology can “see” and use visual data. Behold These Glorious Times! brings together hundreds of thousands of images and flashes them on the screen with dizzying, yet hypnotic, rapidity over the course of twelve minutes. As we learn, these photographic images are taken from training libraries used to teach artificial intelligence networks to recognize objects, faces, expressions, and actions in order to automate human emotions and expressions. Further, as the video progresses, the images begin to break down into more and more basic forms: black and white grids, subtle arrays of shading. In order to recognize images, AI is taught to break apart each picture, analyze its most basic parts, and then make sense of the whole. This alternatively numbing and captivating process is accompanied by an operatic soundtrack (composed by electronic musician Holly Herndon) which, itself, is a product of algorithms: the sounds are pulled from an auditory training library that will teach machines how to recognize human speech. As Paglen explains, when artificial intelligence is being taught how to see, it is fed batches of thousands of images that are sorted into various groupings known as “training sets.” This is what humans look like (note: African-Americans have been mistaken for gorillas); this is what doctors and nurses look like (note: computers readily conclude that doctors are always male and nurses always female based on the data they’re given); this is what a woman wearing a burqa looks like (note: apparently humans can get this wrong as well, so who knows). While there is already enormous bias in the images that we see around the world, we, as humans, have the capacity to critique our own views and try to expand our own “training sets” to challenge our visual stereotypes. While AI itself will not have the same capacity for self-reflection, the real question is whether its programmers and creators will make room for these debates. Power increasingly belongs to those who control this digital output Paglen calls “invisible images.” The basic challenges faced by AI vision will have wide-reaching consequences.

Trevor Paglen’s work combines the knowledge-base of artist, geographer and activist. He is primarily concerned with “learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.” Through unique processes like long distance photography, and conducting research like an investigative journalist, Paglen has presented artworks that live at the very edge of the known and the possible, in the zone of facts-stranger-than-fiction. He’s contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour , and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects ranging from experimental geography to military symbology, from the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program to machine-made images.