BCNM Alum Trevor Paglen in New York Times
Trevor Paglen was featured in the New York Times article "A String Quartet Concert, With an A.I. Assist" by Julie Baumgardner. The article was published in the Art section of the New York Times' Style Magazine.
Read excerpts from the article below:
"“I really don’t think art is good at answering questions — it’s much better at posing questions, and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes,” says the artist Trevor Paglen. With a rigorous practice involving investigation, technology and image-making, Paglen has spent his career crossing boundaries, both disciplinary and physical — “which, for me, is kind of the point of art,” he says.
"To date, Paglen is best known for his work on government surveillance and data collection, in particular an investigation into the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program.
"The performance, titled “Sight Machine,” combines image-making and artificial-intelligence technology: On Saturday, the avant-garde string quartet will play a concert while Paglen’s own A.I. mapping system projects machine-generated images of the musicians behind them in real time. Paglen programmed code, akin to surveillance A.I. algorithms, which processes a live video feed of the performance to create “images of what a particular algorithm is ‘seeing,’” he says, which in this case is the musicians’ movements. “I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see,” Paglen explains."
Read the rest of the article, and more from the New York Times here.
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco