101.6 x 127 cm
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. In order to take this photograph, Paglen traveled to the Black Canyon, south of the Hoover Dam. Only accessible by water, Paglen piloted a boat up the Colorado river into the canyon. Paglen was drawn to the canyon because of the significant role it played in 19th century ‘frontier’ photography. Today, this area is much less photographed than similarly popular locations because it is only accessible by boat. The artist admits that the trip to photograph this historic site wasn’t altogether enjoyable, as he went in the dead of summer while the temperature was 125 degrees fahrenheit. During his stay, he camped along the riverside and barely slept due to the extreme heat. This experience gave Paglen a greater appreciation for the grueling conditions that frontier photographers worked under during the 19th century. The intensely saturated color in the image is due to Deep Saliency, which Paglen explains is produced by “using computer vision to analyze photographs using Artificial Intelligence. In ‘classical’ computer vision, one develops algorithms that look for lines, circles, ‘interesting features,’ and complex shapes and tries to infer something about the images from these ensembles […] one ‘trains’ the neural network on thousands or millions of images, and the network develops its own ‘tools’ to analyze those images. Deep Saliency is a technique to differentiate between sections, areas, or different types of objects in an image as interpreted by a neural network using criteria it has created for itself.” (Altman Siegel, Trevor Paglen , 29).
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...
In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home...
Victory at Sea is a simple mechanism made from cardboard and found materials that mimics the Phenakistoscope, an early cinematic apparatus...
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...
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...
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)...
Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
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...