How to See Like a Machine

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Barbican Centre, London. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and, in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.

Paglen's ideas are smart and suggestive, with the added virtue of being expressed in prose so clear it makes the opacity of other theoretical writing feel like a psyop. This lucidity not only makes his work readable but also staves off the perception that discourse about UFOs and the CIA must be riddled with conspiratorial paranoia... even as Paglen demonstrates how machine vision is shifting our media paradigms, he also demonstrates how human vision can help us navigate the shifts.

• 1. Introduction2. Invisible Images: Your Pictures are looking at you3. Excavating AI4. Machine Realism5. Neural Activations6. Society of PSYOPS7. Archives of the Future8. Conclusion9. Acknowledgements