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Trevor Paglen's Bloom at Pace

24 Sep, 2020

Trevor Paglen's Bloom at Pace

Trevor Paglen’s new show at London’s Pace Gallery, the Bloom Series, explores the themes of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, politics of images, and how computer systems interpret the complexity of life.

It’s generating a lot of buzz! Check out the latest articles featuring the show:

From FAD magazine:

Highlights of the exhibition will include Bloom, a series of large-scale photographs that depict flower formations conceptualized by various computer vision algorithms created to analyze the constituent parts of real-life photographs. The colours and shapes in the images represent similar areas that the AI has detected in learning from other images of flowers. They do not represent real-to-life colours so much as what the AI thinks the different parts of the images are.


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From PHAIDON article:

Trevor Paglen’s new Pace London exhibition Bloom is very much of the moment. A moment that's exposed an intense awareness of the fragility of our lives, cities, and economic and political institutions. A moment in which we’ve spent much of the year huddled at home with social communications reduced to awkward interactions on technological platforms designed to extract as much information about us as possible and that will likely use that information in ways we are yet to imagine. A moment that feels like it's been going on forever.

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From OCULA magazine:

The photographs of trees in flower that give the exhibition its name were conceived and executed under lockdown in New York, when Paglen was struck by the fragility of both human life and social institutions. The morgues in his home borough of Brooklyn were so full that bodies were being kept in refrigerated trucks, and the city that never sleeps was so silent he could hear the street signs on Fifth Avenue creaking in the breeze. Still, with the arrival of spring, flowers were blooming.

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From HYPERALLERGIC:

With Bloom, Trevor Paglen collapses distinctions between the real and virtual, laying bare the prejudices embedded in supposedly objective artificial intelligence systems.Paglen has made a career of visualizing the invisible power structures and systems which govern contemporary society. The American artist-cum-academic has scuba-dived through labyrinths of undersea data cables, photographically infiltrated government “black sites,” and analyzed AI programs used by security systems and social media companies.

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If you're interested in reading more about Paglen's Bloom Series check out the additional articles posted on The Art Newspaper, Creative Review, Art in America, and the British Journal of Photography!