This is one of my all-time favorite images. When I showed it to filmmaker Werner Herzog, he concurred and added that he believed it belonged “next to the Mona Lisa.” Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking was produced by a team of scientists at Cornell University to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, aContinue reading “Demonstration of Eating, Licking, and Drinking”
Author Archives: paglenstudio
It Began as a Military Experiment
Contemporary research into facial recognition technology began in earnest in the mid-1990s at the behest of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The military wanted facial recognition to exist, so DARPA began funding researchers in computer science and computer vision to work on the problem. The military realized that to do facial recognition, researchersContinue reading “It Began as a Military Experiment”
Contrails
Two condensation trails from unknown aircraft flying within the borders of the Air Force’s R-4808N Restricted Airspace. The R-4808N airspace is a section of classified airspace within a larger swath of restricted airspace in central Nevada. Uncleared military pilots inadvertently flying into “the Box” or “the Container” (as they call the ultra-restricted airspace) during war-gameContinue reading “Contrails”
Angelus Novus
Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s last essay, On the Concept of History, excoriates the notion of “progress.” For Benjamin, history is not a linear march led by great men towards a glorious future, but a circular series of endless catastrophe, where we repeat the same humanitarian, political, and economic crises over and over. Benjamin illustrates this ideaContinue reading “Angelus Novus”
Karnak
I often think about the different histories of photography – how they intersect and diverge and how so much necessarily gets left out by any attempt to tell a coherent story about the history of the medium. I think a lot about the various histories of photography in the western US – a history ofContinue reading “Karnak”
Drones
This is a series of photographs of the skies in the Nevada desert. American military and intelligence drones all over the world are flown by pilots here (at places like Creech Air Force Base and “Area 52”) via satellite uplink. In these prints, small Predator, Reaper, and Sentinel drones dot the skyscapes.
The Last Pictures
This project was inspired by an image that came from my work tracking secret satellites. Over the course of my work on satellites, I realized that certain kinds of satellites – those in geosynchronous orbits – experience virtually no drag from the atmosphere below and consequently stay in orbit for extremely long amounts of timeContinue reading “The Last Pictures”
Trinity Cube
Irradiated broken glass collected from inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone forms the outer layer of this sculpture. The work’s inner core is made out of Trinitite, the mineral created on July 16, 1945 when the United States exploded the world’s first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico, heating the desert’s surface to the point whereContinue reading “Trinity Cube”
Excavating AI
This is an article that I co-authored with my friend and collaborator Kate Crawford, who directs the AI Now Institute at NYU. In the article we take a look at some of the bad assumptions and bad politics built into the architecture of the training data used in AI systems.
The X-37B
The American Air Force’s secretive X-37B space-plane-drone is back after it’s fifth mission in orbit. There’s some controversy about whether it deployed an array of small secret satellites in violation of the United Nations’ Registration Convention, which says that all countries have to report on the satellites they put into orbit. I photographed the X-37BContinue reading “The X-37B”