Josef Albers, Gabriel Orozco, Trevor Paglen, and James Turrell
Schemata

In “Schemata,” Krakow Witkin Gallery presents works by four artists, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, who examine the relationship of strict geometry and the mechanical image with organic form and visual perception. 

This week, the focus is on Trevor Paglen and his 2020 carbon print “View of Cygnus | Brute-Force k-Nearest Neighbors Matching of Scale-Invariant Feature Transform Descriptors.” View all of the artists and works in the exhibition here. 

TREVOR PAGLEN

In the above-quoted statement Paglen refers to classic works by Muybridge, O'Sullivan, Watkins, Hillers, and other 19th century “frontier” photographers. While one often encounters these historical referents in a museum setting, many of these seminal images were originally produced for the US Department of War on military “reconnaissance” surveys and are embedded with the colonial narratives of Western Expansion. Paglen asks what a contemporary iteration of frontier photography would reveal about our current structures of power.

With the advent of computer vision and artificial intelligence, the role of images and photographs has changed dramatically. From industrial fabrication and self-driving cars to facial recognition and biometric surveillance, algorithms are the invisible background to our daily lives. Paglen investigates the formal and conceptual logics of computer vision and AI by using modified machine vision software to produce images revealing the internal mechanisms of the algorithms. Paglen translates his 8x10 negatives into digital files that can be read by AI.  He then overlays lines, circles and strokes that signify how computer vision algorithms attempt to "see" by creating mathematical abstractions from images.

Paglen writes, “If we look at real-life forms of computer vision, let’s ask what they’re designed to do. We might say ‘oh they’re for navigating cars, or for doing quality control for manufacturing, or for recognizing objects or’—I think to that I’d say: no, these forms of ‘seeing’ are mostly about doing one of two things, often in tandem. First, making money. Second, increasing the efficiency of centralized forms of power, for example the police or the military. And that this has a long history— that the 19th Century photos I reference in this body of work were part of efforts led by the Department of War to map the west and to figure out how to mine it and settle it.

“This body of work for me is about trying to see how photography and power were coupled together in the past, and to think about how those couplings might be taking place now in the age of computer vision and AI.”

Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) lives and works in New York, NY. As an artist, filmmaker, investigator, technologist, and theorist, Paglen asks questions around vision, perception, materiality, and aesthetics. His wide-ranging œuvre includes work on artificial intelligence and computer vision, aerospace technology, secrecy and conspiracy, experimental landscapes, speculative fiction, nuclear histories, notional archaeology, psychological operations, and the Weird. Among his diverse projects, Paglen has photographed secret military bases from enormous distances; tracked classified satellites and objects of unknown origin in earth orbit; led underwater tours of internet infrastructure; created a radioactive sculpture for a nuclear exclusion zone; profiled an Air Force disinformation specialist; built numerous AI and computer vision models; performed with the Kronos Quartet; written several books; and launched two sculptures into space.