The Art Angle Podcast: Why Artist Trevor Paglen Is Doing Everything He Can to Warn Humanity About Artificial Intelligence

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

In fall 2019, a new app called ImageNet
Roulette was introduced to the world with what seemed like a
simple, fun premise: snap a selfie, upload it to a database, and
wait a few seconds for machine learning to tell you what type of
person you are. Maybe a “teacher,” maybe a “pilot,” maybe even just
a “woman.” Or maybe, as the app’s creator warned, the labels the
system tagged you with would be shockingly racist, misogynistic, or
misanthropic. Frequently, the warning turned out to be prescient,
and the app immediately went viral thanks to its penchant for slurs
and provocative presumptions.

Long since decommissioned, ImageNet Roulette was part of a
larger initiative undertaken by artist Trevor
Paglen and artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford to
expose the latent biases coded into the massive data sets informing
a growing number of A.I. systems. It was only the latest light that
Paglen’s work had shined onto the dark underbelly of our
image-saturated, technology-mediated world. Even beyond his Ph.D.
in geography and his MacArthur “Genius” grant, Paglen’s resume is
unique among his peers on blue-chip gallery rosters. He’s
photographically infiltrated CIA black sites, scuba-dived through labyrinths of undersea data
cables, launched art into space, and collaborated with
NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, all as a
means of making innovative art that brings into focus the
all-but-invisible power structures governing contemporary life.

On this week’s episode of The Art Angle, Paglen—who is about to
debut a show of new work at San Francisco’s Altman Siegel
Gallery once it is able to reopen—joins Andrew Goldstein by phone
to discuss his adventurous career. Although the episode was
recorded before George Floyd’s murder sparked nationwide
demonstrations for racial justice, Paglen’s work is more timely
than ever for its probing of surveillance, authoritarianism, and
the ways both are being simultaneously empowered and cloaked by
A.I.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)

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The Art Angle Podcast: The New Yorker’s Peter
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The Art Angle Podcast: Ai Weiwei on the
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The Art Angle Podcast: How Photography Is Being
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The post The Art Angle Podcast: Why Artist Trevor Paglen Is
Doing Everything He Can to Warn Humanity About Artificial
Intelligence appeared first on artnet News.