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

How I became an artist: Trevor Paglen

登入並訂閱巴塞爾藝術展專題故事

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.

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.

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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這位美國特立獨行的藝術家於倫敦、匹茲堡和都靈舉行個展，他跟我們談談他獨門的創作風格

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