How To See Like a Machine
Trevor Paglen
Verso
English
Hardcover
192 pages
140 × 210 mm
2026
ISBN 9781836742166
We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking at us. By the award-winning artist, filmmaker and thinker. Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cameras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies “say” about the world, he teaches us to ask what they “do” and where such images come from. Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this apparently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.
(Source: www.versobooks.com/products/3477-how-to-see-like-a-machine)
About the Artist
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
paglen.studio
(Source: paglen.studio/bio)
About the Publisher
Verso was launched as a paperback imprint at the end of the seventies. During the nineties Verso set up an office in New York, and secured its reputation in a number of established and emerging fields. Since 2000, against the backdrop of America’s Long War, Verso has made landmark interventions in international politics, the Middle East, and South America, whilst also establishing a growing list of fiction, biography and memoir titles.
www.versobooks.com
(Source: www.versobooks.com/pages/about-verso)
