Trevor Paglen: Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations

How machine and computer vision produces contemporary images.

Although often considered to be a fault or a glitch in the system, the event of hallucination is central to the models of image production generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Through mining the latent space of computer vision, Trevor Paglen’s series Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017-ongoing) reveals this phantasmal and hallucinatory domain. In the conversation included in this volume, he discusses how we can think from within these opaque structures and, in turn, questions the frequently inflated claims made on behalf of automated image-production systems. In an accompanying essay, Anthony Downey explores the uncanny realm of algorithmically induced images and proposes that AI, through its generative modeling of the world, invariably estranges us from the present and the future.

Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer who explores and documents invisible infrastructures, ranging from secret corporate and government sites to networks known through technologies of non-human, machine vision. Paglen’s work spans through image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering and numerous other disciplines. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at Vienna Secession, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Van Abbe Museum, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Protocinema Istanbul, and he has participated in group exhibitions the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and numerous other venues.

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa within the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Media at Birmingham City University. He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text, Digital War, Memory, Mind & Media, and is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press).