Trevor Paglen is this year’s winner of the LG Guggenheim Award for technology-minded artists, the New York museum revealed on Tuesday. Through the prize, he will win $100,000, a vast sum that he said will support the costs of his work, which contends with surveillance technology and AI.
“This is very expensive work to do,” Paglen told ARTnews. “The R&D costs are insane. So this definitely helps me fund a project I didn’t know how to fund, one that’s pretty expensive. That’s really exciting.”
Paglen, who won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2017, is best known for photographs that appear to represent placid skies, abstracted landscapes, and shimmering stars. In fact, all of these pictures document forms of surveillance that are deliberately stowed away from the view of the general public. Other projects have contended with the infrastructure of the internet and machine vision, or the means by which technology analyzes and identifies the world around it.
While AI has emerged as a more recent concern in mainstream discourse, Paglen has been making art about it for more than a decade. One 2020 series by Paglen, titled “Bloom,” involved feeding pictures of trees covered in flowers into AI, which then colored the trees according to systems that aren’t disclosed to the viewer. This year, Paglen will release a book called How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI.
“The high-level argument [of the book] is that we’ve undergone, or are in the middle of undergoing, two revolutions in our relationship to images, each one of which is as big as the invention of perspective or the invention of photography,” Paglen said. “And those two revolutions are the advent of computer vision in the 2000s and 2010s, and then the advent of generative AI in the last few years. Both of those revolutions create a different enough relationship between humans and images that older theoretical models for thinking about images need to be updated.”
In a statement, the five-person jury of the LG Guggenheim Award, which included Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka and Guggenheim associate curator Noam Segal, praised Paglen as “one of the most influential artists of our time.”
“Paglen’s sustained commitment to addressing urgent global concerns—through rigorous artistic research, technological subversion, intellectual risk-taking, and engagement with universal subject matter—has resulted in a coherent and highly distinctive artistic oeuvre,” the jury wrote. “His works consistently bring legibility and public access to opaque and often inaccessible technologies, while resisting dominant corporate narratives and foregrounding broader societal and ethical considerations.”
Paglen, who will stage an as yet un-detailed event at the Guggenheim on May 18, is the fourth winner of the award, after Shu Lea Cheang, Stephanie Dinkins, and Ayoung Kim.