Author Archives: paglenstudio

Orbital Reflector

Produced in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, Orbital Reflector is a sculpture constructed of a lightweight and highly-reflective polyethylene material housed in a small box-like satellite bus. The satellite was meant to be inserted into orbit and after a few days deploy the reflective structure, creating a 100m long diamond-shaped mirror to reflect sunlightContinue reading “Orbital Reflector”

Nonfunctional Satellites

The “nonfunctional satellites” are sculptures designed to be placed into low-earth orbit where they will appear as bright points of light slowly moving across the sky to viewers on earth’s surface. They are designed to last for only a few weeks before burning up in the atmosphere. Developed in collaboration with aerospace engineers, the designsContinue reading “Nonfunctional Satellites”

Landing Sites

As part of a larger project looking at the material infrastructures of the internet and mass surveillance, I located and photographed some of the primary “choke points” on the internet backbone – places where multiple undersea cables reach land and connect the continents together. Each photograph had two “rules”: first, the conjunction of internet cablesContinue reading “Landing Sites”

Autonomy Cube

Autonomy Cube is a sculpture designed to be housed in art museums, galleries, and civic spaces. The sculpture is meant to be both “seen” and “used.” This happens in several ways. Internet‐connected computers housed within the work create an open Wi‐Fi hotspot called “Autonomy Cube” wherever it is installed. Anyone can join this network andContinue reading “Autonomy Cube”

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels)

For a 2019 commission in the Barbican’s Curve Gallery in London, I took a close look at the most widely-used “training set” used in AI – ImageNet, a database of over 14 million images organized into more than twenty-thousand categories. The installation was made out of approximately 30,000 individually printed photographs, showing the precarious relationshipsContinue reading “From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (Pictures and Labels)”

They Took the Faces…

Contemporary facial-recognition algorithms were first properly researched in the early 1990s. To conduct that research, computer scientists and software engineers need large collections of faces to experiment with and to use as performance benchmarks. Before the advent of social media, a common source of faces for this research and development came from mugshots of accusedContinue reading “They Took the Faces…”

Eagle-Eye Photo Contest

While photographing and shooting a video of NSA infrastructures in Germany for Laura Poitras’ film Citizenfour, I was stopped and interrogated by police and military on a nearly daily basis. Although what I was doing was perfectly legal, the military still insisted on harassing me while I was doing my job. My response was toContinue reading “Eagle-Eye Photo Contest”

Training Humans

I conceptualized this exhibition with Kate Crawford to tell a story about the history of images used to ‘recognize’ humans in computer vision and AI systems. We weren’t interested in either the hyped, marketing version of AI nor the tales of dystopian robot futures. We wanted to engage with the materiality of AI, and toContinue reading “Training Humans”

Sites Unseen

Sites Unseen was a major solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum curated by John P. Jacob, where I presented my early photographic series alongside more recent sculptural objects and new work with AI. With this exhibition I continued my contribution to the ongoing conversation about privacy and surveillance in contemporary society. There wasContinue reading “Sites Unseen”