Trevor Paglen’s work investigates the role that pictures currently have in relation to the digital and satellite technologies that produce them. Considering that these pictures are a product of military and police developments associated with surveillance, Paglen accounts for the relation between the human perspective and these technologies, in other words, of how we see them and are seen through them.

His work focuses on the fact that nowadays a great number of pictures are produced automatically by software and hardware systems (security or quality review cameras) and by artificial intelligence (algorithms that determine what to capture or which pictures to produce by joining some images with others), redefining the position of the human eye and of the individual as a subject of view. Moreover, it explores the origin of these technologies, which are located beyond our own visibility: while they are there and watching, apparently beyond our consciousness about them.

The pieces included in this exhibition use these photographic technologies to examine the interspaces between their original purpose, the political implications, and the domestic use that they are occasionally given.

*Image: Babel (Corpus: Spheres of Purgatory)

Adversarially Evolved Hallucination, 2017

© Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the artist and

Altman Siegel, San Francisco.