Alum Trevor Paglen at Manifesta 12
More than 50 artists have spread across 20 venues throughout Palermo, Italy, for Manifesta 12, held this year from June 16th to November 4th, 2018. Manifesta is the European Nomadic Biennial, held in a different host city every two years. It is a major international art event, attracting visitors from all over the world.
The theme this year is “The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence,” referencing botanist Gilles Clément's comment that the world is like a garden tended by its human inhabitants.
From the website:
Throughout history, the city of Palermo has been a laboratory for diversity and cross-pollination. Continuous migration – from the Ancient Greeks, the Arabs and the Normans to the recent arrival from Northern Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East – has constantly redefined the city and its people. Palermo’s streets, architecture, parks, cultural legacy and personal histories are the result of a long-lasting syncretism of cultures across the Mediterranean and beyond.
Alum Trevor Paglen will contribute It Began as a Military Experiment, 2017, a series of prints. Description below:
Contemporary research in the field of facial recognition techniques began in the mid 1990s by order of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. At the start of that decade, the military authorities established FERET, the database that collected tens of thousands of photographs of people, the majority of which were employed at a military base in Maryland. This work was created by compiling a selection of portraits so as to retouch them and analyse them using an algorithm capable of identifying facial recognition points. The project seeks to reflect on the superstructural qualities of these portraits, produced not for human eyes but for machines. The selection represents some of the “original” faces on which much of later research around facial recognition is based.
For more information, visit the Manifesta website.