I think about clouds a lot. They’re really strange things – on one hand, humans have gone to great lengths to characterize different kinds of clouds, creating intricate cloud atlases and taxonomies. On the other hand, when we look at clouds we tend to imagine them taking different shapes – faces, animals, and whatnot. AndContinue reading “Clouds”
Author Archives: paglenstudio
Undersea Cables
When I was working on the Landing Sites images, it occurred to me that if one were to literally “dive into” the seascapes that I was making images of, one should theoretically be able to see the actual material conjunctions of internet cables that I was trying to learn how to “see.” To do thisContinue reading “Undersea Cables”
The Other Night Sky
This is an ongoing project to track and photograph the world of secret satellites that are above our heads nearly constantly. Although the satellites I track and photograph in this series are not typically acknowledged by the United States, they are cataloged and observed by an international network of amateur “satellite observers,” whose observations IContinue reading “The Other Night Sky”
ImageNet Roulette
ImageNet Roulette was part of a broader project to draw attention to the things that can – and regularly do – go wrong when artificial intelligence models are trained on problematic training data. ImageNet Roulette is trained on the “person” categories from a dataset called ImageNet (developed at Princeton and Stanford Universities in 2009), oneContinue reading “ImageNet Roulette”
Making Faces
Kate Crawford and I were invited by Prada Mode to create an exhibition and cultural program at the iconic Maxim’s restaurant in Paris. We transformed the space into a story about the history of facial analysis and a reminder of the dark histories from which contemporary facial recognition systems emerge. Pages from 19th Century phrenologyContinue reading “Making Faces”
Challenge Coins
The Challenge Coins are wall-mounted sculptures whose designs are inspired by various military and law-enforcement “challenge coins.” These are awarded to the participants of special operations successfully undertaking aspects of particular missions. These tokens serve as both a competitive incentive for high levels of performance and a manifest form of symbolic currency, marking the acquisitionContinue reading “Challenge Coins”
The Fence
In 1979, astronomer W. T. “Woody” Sullivan worked with two undergraduates at the University of Washington to publish a now-classic paper entitled “Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of Earth.” Sullivan et al. found that the brightest continuous signals emanating from earth came from military radar systems designed to detect ballistic missiles and track satellites in earth orbit,Continue reading “The Fence”
Rendition Flights
In the early 2000s, I did a lot of work investigating the CIA’s so-called “extraordinary rendition” program. This was a program to kidnap, disappear, and torture people that the agency accused of terrorism. Done mostly in collaboration with investigative journalist AC Thompson, the work involved tracking airplanes that we knew the CIA was using forContinue reading “Rendition Flights”
Black Sites
With the beginning of the so-called War on Terror in the early 2000s, the CIA set up a network of secret prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Hundreds of “ghost prisoners” went through this system of extrajudicial disappearance and imprisonment. The black sites became synonymous with torture. The locations of the secret prisonsContinue reading “Black Sites”
Image Operations
Shot in Berlin’s historic Funkhaus, Image Operations. Op.10 is a video installation that highlights emerging forms of computer vision and machine learning. A string quartet performs Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10. As the video evolves, the perspective of the view slowly changes from that of a camera, to that of an arrayContinue reading “Image Operations”