The New York museum revealed on Tuesday that Trevor Paglen has won this year’s LG Guggenheim Technical Artist Award. Through the award, he will win $100,000, which he says will support the costs of his work battling surveillance technology and artificial intelligence.
“It’s a very expensive job,” Paglen told art news. “R&D costs are so high. So it’s definitely helping me fund a project that I didn’t know how to fund, a very expensive project. It’s really exciting.”
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Paglen, who received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017, is known for his photographs of calm skies, abstract landscapes and twinkling stars. In fact, all of these photographs document forms of surveillance deliberately hidden from public view. Other projects deal with the infrastructure of the internet and machine vision, or the way technology analyzes and identifies the world around it.
While artificial intelligence has only recently become a concern in mainstream discourse, Paglen has been making art about it for more than a decade. One of Paglen’s 2020 series, titled “Bloom,” saw images of trees filled with flowers fed into an artificial intelligence, which then colored the trees according to a system that was not revealed to the audience. This year, Paglen will publish a book titled How to observe like a machine: Image after AI.
“The main thesis[of the book]is that our relationship with images has gone through or is going through two revolutions, each as big as the invention of perspective or the invention of photography,” Paglen said. “Those two revolutions were the emergence of computer vision in the 2000s and 2010s, and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence in more recent years. Both revolutions created a different enough relationship between humans and images that old theoretical models for thinking about images required updating.”
The five-member jury for the LG Guggenheim Prize, which includes Mori Art Museum director Asami Kataoka and Guggenheim associate curator Noam Siegel, praised Paglen in a statement as “one of the most influential artists of our time.”
“Peglen’s sustained commitment to addressing pressing global issues through rigorous artistic research, technological disruption, intellectual risk-taking, and engagement with universal themes results in coherent and highly distinctive artworks,” the jury wrote. “His work consistently brings readability and accessibility to opaque and often inaccessible technologies to the public, while resisting dominant corporate narratives and highlighting broader social and ethical considerations.”
Paglen, who will host an as-yet-unspecified event at the Guggenheim on May 18, is the fourth recipient, joining Shu Lea Cheang, Stephanie Dinkins and Ayoung Kim.
