Trevor Paglen: Bloom

Pace Gallery’s second exhibition with Trevor Paglen coincides with two solo exhibitions presented at The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (4th September 2020 – 14th March 2021) and at OGR Turin (10th October 2020 – 10th January 2021).

At 6 Burlington Gardens until 10th November, and on the gallery’s digital platform,
works explore Paglen’s central themes of artificial intelligence, the politics of images, fa-cial recognition technologies, and alternative futures.

New sculptures, drawings and digital components relate to corporate and state use of machine learning algorithms to monitor, extract value, and influence people’s lives.

“Computer vision and artificial intelligence have become ubiquitous,” says Paglen. “The works in this exhibition seek to provide a small glimpse into the workings of platforms that track faces, nature, and human behaviour, and into the underlying data that structures how machines ‘perceive’ humans and landscapes. In this new work, I am interested in exploring the numerous examples of computer training sets creating AIs that reflect and perpetuate unacknowledged forms of racism, patriarchy, and class division that charac-terise so much of society.”

Centre-stage is The Standard Head, a large-scale reconstruction of 1960s pioneer CIA agent Woody Bledsoe’s mathematical model of a “standard head”, which Paglen has re-constructed from information in Bledsoe’s archive at the University of Texas.

The artist’s large-scale photographs Bloom validate intuition that something is ‘off’. These flower formations have been imagined by various computer vision algorithms created to analyse the constituent parts of real-life photographs.

Octopus, meanwhile, is an all-encompassing work allowing visitors to engage with the show through an online portal. A critical dialogue on the nature of how we use media, technology and how it impacts the way we see and are seen, visitors are given the option to stream their personal webcams into the gallery space on monitors. The discreet sanc-tuary of home is no longer certain.

Trevor Paglen: Bloom; until 10th November 2020; Pace Gallery, 6 Burlington Gardens, W1. Contact the gallery for current visiting protocol.