- “Winona”
Eigenface (Colorized),
Labelled Faces in the Wild Dataset
2016
Trevor Paglen & Hal Foster
If I told those outside this classroom and field of research (my septuagenarian mother for example) that there was a vast alternate universe where machines created, tracked, and surveilled images largely for the processing and consumption of other machines, for purposes largely unknown and invisible to humans yet greatly affecting them, they might think I was describing a piece of science fiction. The Matrix, perhaps? Take the blue pill, Morpheus would say, and you’ll never know this universe existed. Take the red pill, and “I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Tevor Paglen wants everyone to take the red pill. “Something dramatic has happened,” claims Paglen. “The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop.” For Paglen, this occurrence can be described as a break in our historic understanding of visual culture, from one based on “fleshy things” viewed with another set of “fleshy things” (our eyeballs), to one where machines do all of the looking. This shift, resulting in what Paglen describes as a culture of machine vision, is “detached from human eyes”, and therefore remains largely invisible.
So how deep does the machine vision rabbit hole go? In
Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) from this weeks readings, Paglen makes a convincing case that we’re staring into the Nietzschen Abyss: “Its continued expansion is starting to have profound effects on human life, eclipsing even the rise of mass culture in the mid 20th century.” Paglen goes on to describe in detail the inner-workings of this burgeoning mostly unseen machine vision culture, and it’s wider implications for a society that increasingly communicates with images. He touches on issues ranging from ideological pitfalls to exercises and abuses of power from both corporate and governmental entities.
For those interested in a more critical-theoretical discussion on many of the topics we’ve been covering in this class thus far, I would point to two essays in Hal Foster’s recent publication:
What Comes After Farce?
In
Smashed Screens, Foster largely covers the implications of Hito Steryl’s work in, around, and through her seminal publication Duty Free Art, with both past and future nods to Walter Benjamin, Harun Faruki and Trevor Paglen.
- Screen Capture from Hito Steryl's How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013
The essay
Machine Images delves almost entirely on the work of Trevor Paglen. One question Foster asks warrants my attention in particular: “ So why present this research in the form of art at all?” And then answers with the following, which I believe is worth quoting in its entirety:
"… but the primary justification is that Paglen continues the critique of representations and institutions developed by artistic predecessors from Hans Haacke to Jenny Holzer. He also implies that, however embedded in the neoliberal economy, the art world can still provide limited occasions for media safe houses."
Paglen’s response here implies that exploring, or perhaps
exposing such modus operandi may threaten power structures that are invested in keeping certain technological wizardry tucked safely behind the curtain, away from the larger scrutiny of society. Which begs the question: What exactly aren’t we seeing?
Links:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3170-w ... fter-farce
https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-ima ... ng-at-you/