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.

To be literate today means to come to terms with how the twin technical transformations of our time, computer vision and generative AI, work, and how they work on us: how they have reformatted our perception and cognition, our labor and leisure, our representations and realities, and will continue to do so with ever greater intensity. There is no better guide than Trevor Paglen, our most exploratory of artists, who, for two decades, has cracked open each new version of this black box, exposing proprietary abuses, inventing critical terms, devising counter uses, and imagining alternative futures. How to See Like a Machine is the toolkit we need.

• 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