TREVOR PAGLEN’S BORDER ABSTRACTIONS IN THE AGE OF MACHINE VISION

Abstract

Over the past two decades, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) have become integrated into many aspects of daily life, and with machines generating images for other machines, humans are no longer at the centre of the image world. To explore the implications of the age of machine vision, this article focuses on a selection of work by American artist Trevor Paglen made between 2008 and 2018. It examines the significance of the US-Mexico border region as a site of his investigations and the role of abstraction in repositioning machine vision within the human-centred visual language of art. The article shows how Paglen’s body of work turns toward the nonhuman to consider what it means to make images when representation is no longer primarily a site for the construction of meaning by humans but is also a field of data for analysis by machines. It explores how Paglen conveys the interplay between different models of vision with an aesthetic sensibility that develops from the history of photography but signals the breakdown of representational photography. His work highlights the contested space of the US-Mexico border region as a key site in a surveillance infrastructure that depends on a new regime of vision and offers a space to reflect on what it means to live in a world where most images are now made by and for machines.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to David Bate, Liz Wells, and Erina Duganne of photographies journal, as well as to other organizers and participants involved in the Borders & Boundaries conference held in San Antonio, Texas, in 2022, where I presented a preliminary version of this research. Many thanks to Madeline Bassnett and Sarah Parsons for comments on early drafts of the essay. Special thanks to Trevor Paglen and Pace Gallery for permission to reproduce images of the artwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Leers, Mirror with a Memory, 79. Drone is the common term for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The WAPS camera captures and analyzes image data from an area with an approximately thirty-mile radius.

2. Paglen, “Operational Images”; and Pantenburg, “Working Images”, 49–62.

3. Steyerl and Paglen, “The Autonomy of Images”, 251.

4. Jacob and Skrebowski,Trevor Paglen. A few of the works discussed were also exhibited in Surveillance States: Trevor Paglen, curated by Scott McLeod at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art during the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. This small exhibition presented a series of the artist’s photographs alongside two of his video installations to consider the role of surveillance in everyday life. See Prefix Photo 37 (May 2018).

5. Paglen, “Experimental Geography,” 26–33; and Jacob, “Trevor Paglen,” 26–28.

6. Foundational texts include: Donald, “Editorial,” 1–4; Rosler, Three Works; Burgin, The End of Art Theory; Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 3–64; Pollock, Vision and Difference; and Tagg, The Burden of Representation.

7. On the politics of representation, see Hall, “The Work of Representation,” 1–47.

8. See Grusin, “Introduction,” vii–xxix.

9. Jacob, “Trevor Paglen,” 47.

10. Crawford, Atlas of AI, 211–17.

11. Ibid., 10–11.

12. Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images”; and Crawford and Steyerl, “Data Streams.”

13. Three transmitter sites were located in the southern US at Jordon Lake, Alabama; Lake Kickapoo, Texas; and Gila River, Arizona. R. Cargill Hall, “Civil-Military Relations in America’s Early Space Program,” The US Air Force in Space, 1945 to the Twenty-First Century, ed. R. Cargill Hall and Jacob Neufeld. (Washington, DC: United States Air Force, 1998), 26; and Stacy Glaus, “End of an Era for AFSSS,” Peterson Air Force Base, US Air Force, October 9, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20140324231726/http://www.peterson.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123366499.

14. Jones, Violent Borders, 33.

15. Dunn, The Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978–1992, 103–40, 161–63; and Jones, Violent Borders, 34–35.

16. Jones, Violent Borders, 36–37. Also see Miller, Empire of Borders, 74–78.

17. See Pötzsch, “Capturing Clouds,” 65–82.

18. For instance, see Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, 91; and Mountz, “The Enforcement Archipelago,” 118–28.

19. Nolen, “Southern Exposure.”

20. Martina Tazzioli, “The Temporal Borders of Asylum,” 13–22; and Axelsson, “Border Timespaces,” 59–74.

21. Axelsson, “Border Timespaces,” 62.

22. Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 26–27.

23. Ibid.

24. Browne, Dark Matters, 16.

25. Visibility Machines: a conversation with Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen, in association with an exhibition at University of Maryland, Baltimore, 2013. National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/audio/faroki-paglen.html.

26. Jacob, “Trevor Paglen,” 69.

27. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography and Abstraction,” 66.

28. See note 26 above.

29. Ibid.

30. Jacob, “Trevor Paglen,” 77; Benney and Kistler, “Trevor Paglen”; and Chakrabarti, “Do Androids Dream of Representative Art?”

31. Bate, “Daguerre’s Abstraction,” 136–39.

32. Ibid., 139–44.

33. Alfred Stieglitz, “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” Amateur Photographer and Photography 56 (1923), reprinted in Richard Whelan and Sarah Greenough, ed. Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes (New York: Aperture, 2000), 237.

34. On AI as an extractive industry, see Crawford, Atlas of AI, 211–27.

35. See note 25 above.

36. Paglen explores generative AI in subsequent bodies of work starting in 2017.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a research grant from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Western University.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Bassnett

Sarah Bassnett is a Professor of Art History at Western University, where she specializes in the history of photography and photo-based contemporary art. She is the author of Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) and co-author with Sarah Parsons of Photography in Canada, 1839-1989: An Illustrated History (Art Canada Institute, 2023).