As solo shows open in London, Pittsburgh, and Turin, the American maverick revisits his singular artistic trajectory

How I became an artist: Trevor Paglen

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You were awarded&nbsp;the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2016 for an exhibition that included images of covert government sites, and many of the works you’re best known for are photographs. Is the medium a particular interest or is it simply a tool to express social and political concerns?Rather than a particular medium, I’m interested in looking at the world, and in what I can work with to encapsulate ideas. There’s a long history of conversations about truth claims in relation to photographic images. I picked up photography to make work about ‘black sites,’ places that didn’t exist in the early 2000s.An earlier sound work you began as a young artist fresh out of UC Berkeley, Recording Carceral Landscapes [1998–2004], tackles&nbsp;prisons. Was this the genesis of your interest in covert spaces?That project really started me thinking about geography, space, and infrastructure. The question was, what and where is a prison? Obviously, there are prisons out in California, typically in rural, faraway places. When you start to think about the political and economic dynamics that create prisons, it becomes less clear where exactly the institutions of prisons begin and end. There are histories of racism and exclusion that are ubiquitous. I studied music composition as an undergraduate, too, and that project used a lot of sound.

After completing your MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago you then went back to UC Berkeley, where you got a PhD in geography. Did you think you might go off on a different trajectory from art?After my MFA, I was doing more investigative work and adopting the aesthetics of social science in the tradition of the artist as anthropologist, and so on. I thought if you’re interested enough, the research should be as good as if you were a professional.A big project that came out of that was the book Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World [2009]. How did you choose the sites it exposed?It was during the war on terror after September 11. Some of the signature institutions were prisons, such as Guantanamo Bay. There was also a network of secret prisons around the world that the CIA was running. It was less about choosing sites than looking at different stories that reveal something about how the infrastructure and geographies of these places work. I asked, what does it mean to be a place that, for political purposes, does not ‘exist’?How difficult is it to actually photograph covert sites?Technically, it’s very much its own thing. I was figuring out how to do it when I was working on the qualifying exams for my PhD. I’d read books all day, and at night try to photograph San Francisco airport, about 25 miles away, from the roof of my building at UC Berkeley.

What about in terms of actually physically going to these places? Have you ever been warned off?All the time, and it’s usually not that big a deal – although it can be tense. But I’ve been cautious. I’m not interested in breaking laws or getting into confrontations. I’m not interested in being bullied either, but you can usually find a thread through those two things.Your father was an air force ophthalmologist and you grew up on military bases. How did that shape your perspective of the military and government and your interest in all this?I think it created a very different visceral sense of what the US’ global footprint is and the way the US wields power around its states. Also, to me, the military doesn’t feel like an alien institution in the way that I think it does to a lot of people.What does working in an art context allow you to do in comparison to, say, investigative journalism?I’m obsessed with metaphor, allegory, mediation, signification, and the elliptical relationships between images, words, and meanings. Within a journalistic context they are rarely discussed and are assumed to be pretty uncomplicated things. Playing with those forms of meaning and interpretation is, for me, what is exciting about art.

Yet many of your collaborators are not from the artworld. They include the documentary maker Laura Poitras, whose Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour [2014] used your footage of surveillance bases, and the investigative journalist AC Thompson, with whom you made the book Torture Taxi [2006], looking at the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. How has that shaped your approach to art-making and what art can do or be?Those kinds of collaborations are core to what I do. Partly, it’s that there are other people who have skills that I don’t have. Collaborating with A.C. Thompson was super-interesting because the way he would think through a problem from a journalistic perspective was so different from how I had been trained in art or science. That’s equally true, in a methodological sense, with someone like Laura Poitras – making a film is really different from an art exhibition. It’s almost like [working with collaborators outside the artworld] gives you new colors to play with.More recently you’ve made a number of projects with Kate Crawford, the co-founder and director of research at the AI Now Institute at New York University. How did you first start working together?Kate studies the social implications of AI. I was working on the Edward Snowden materials with Laura Poitras, looking at big data infrastructures and asking what can be done when collecting data on a planetary scale. One of those things is artificial intelligence. We started having conversations with Kate about the political and economic implications of AI. I’ve since become an artist fellow at the AI Now Institute. Artificial intelligence and art actually have a ton to do with each other [with regard to how much] AI is based on images. Massive collections of images called training sets ‘teach’ data systems how to recognize objects using thousands of pictures of apples, oranges, bananas, or what have you.

As an artist, what can you bring to the table?For a lot of people in computer science, the images present a pretty unquestioned proposition – here’s a picture of an orange and here’s the label and that’s what it is. If you ask anybody with an art background, that’s a much more complicated set of questions, there’s nothing straightforward about that.What about the transition from looking at real-world sites, be they military or government operations, in order to produce images, to working through the aesthetic challenges of dealing with data?The processes are different though conceptually very related to each other. Looking at the NSA and the Snowden files, and global and collection surveillance infrastructures, suddenly you realize there’s this thing called Google, which is way bigger than the NSA and is doing approximately the same thing, albeit for different ends. Thinking about data, the question is, what kind of information is being collected and how is that being interpreted? Interpretations always have politics. One strategy to tackle the issue is simply to look at the training set images and the classifications that computer scientists make with training systems.ImageNet Roulette [2019] was one project you did with a training system that became very well known beyond the artworld.I created a website that tells you how your selfie would be classified according to the most dominant training set in the world – ImageNet. It’s a collection of about 14 million images that are organized into about 21,000 categories. About 2,500 categories are the different kinds of people. Some are pretty straightforward, like 'cheerleader,' 'Boy Scout,' or 'scuba diver.' A lot are just horrible, like ‘bad person,’ or ‘deader.’ It’s deeply disturbing when you look at the guts of it – racist, misogynistic, horrible. The website blew up on the Internet. I think it did prompt a lot of long-overdue conversations in the world of technology as well.

Are you hopeful for a social movement that might change how our data is being used?Hope is not a word I use. Optimism, pessimism? Just do stuff! You don’t have to wish. We’re moving into a world in which people are working from home and doing more schooling online, and there is going to be a demand to use even greater surveillance. There are a million different problems with that. It’s good to try to bring these things out into the public [domain] and try to hold some of these people accountable.Is the pandemic changing how you make work?How to work in this environment, logistically but also creatively, has been a lot to figure out. Images are like quicksand right now. They’re changing so fast. The figure of the runner, or a plane in the sky, can leave you horrified. A global pandemic supercharges the ways in which the meanings of images are changing. Keeping up is like trying to swim inside a tidal wave.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8290/Trevor-Paglen" target="_blank">Trevor Paglen</a> is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1242/Pace-Gallery" target="_blank">Pace</a>, New York City, London, Hong Kong, Seoul, Geneva, Palo Alto, East Hamptons;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1216/Metro-Pictures" target="_blank">Metro Pictures</a>, New York City;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1060/Altman-Siegel" target="_blank">Altman Siegel</a>,&nbsp;San Francisco.‘Trevor Paglen: Opposing Geometries’, September 4, 2020-March 14, 2021, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.‘Trevor Paglen, Unseen Stars’, from October 10, 2020, OGR, Turin.‘Trevor Paglen, Bloom’, September 10-November 10, 2020, Pace, London.

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As solo shows open in London, Pittsburgh, and Turin, the American maverick revisits his singular artistic trajectory 

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As solo shows open in London, Pittsburgh, and Turin, the American maverick revisits his singular artistic trajectory