101.6 x 81.28 cm
Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision. This photograph was taken at Half Dome, a frequently visited granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park, California. For this work, Paglen created a digital file of the 8 x 10 inch photographic negative so that the artificial intelligence program can apply computer vision to evaluate the content of the image. In the photograph, Paglen visually represents lines that indicate how computer vision read the image, revealing the visual logic of the algorithms. As part of this project, Paglen traveled through the American West to photograph iconic sites that were historically the subject matter of 19th century frontier photographers, as well as still popular subject matter today for professionals and amateurs alike. Originally, many of the photographs produced by frontier photographers were used by the US Department of Defense for military reconnaissance, thus the historical images are deeply rooted in American colonial projects.
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.
Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering...
A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Working independently, Herndon experimented at the forefront of a now-canonical method—appropriation—by painting additions into found images from magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated in a way that imbues the resulting works with mythical significance...
Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...
Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...
The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision...
Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...
Olive Martin & Patrick Bernier: New Kahnawaké “From my house I take the Proxad, Nantes and Brittany, to Paris where I get on the Teleglobe which takes me to Montreal via New York, and then finally take the Mohawk which drops me off at the 7 Sultans Casino” (extract from the commentary based on an internet connection route plotted by Traceroute*) The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier River named during the period of American colonization...
Olive Martin & Patrick Bernier: New Kahnawaké “From my house I take the Proxad, Nantes and Brittany, to Paris where I get on the Teleglobe which takes me to Montreal via New York, and then finally take the Mohawk which drops me off at the 7 Sultans Casino” (extract from the commentary based on an internet connection route plotted by Traceroute*) The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier River named during the period of American colonization...
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...