Trevor Paglen — Invisible Images and ImageNet Roulette

2016

Artists: Trevor Paglen, Kate Crawford (collaborator) · Year: 2016 · Medium: Photography, installation, and interactive web tool — investigating machine-vision datasets and their politics · Substrate: Machine-vision systems; training datasets (ImageNet, Fotograf); photography of those systems' infrastructure · Place: Berlin, Germany / New York, USA · Institution: Independent; Pace Gallery; Prada Foundation Trevor Paglen's 2016 essay Invisible Images (published in The New Inquiry) was one of the first substantive artistic statements on the politics of machine-vision training datasets. Paglen argued that the proliferation of AI systems trained on images — and the massive, mostly-unacknowledged labor of classifying and labeling those images — was producing a new infrastructure of surveillance and categorization that warranted the same critical attention that earlier photographic technologies had received. The essay set an intellectual agenda that his subsequent work has continued to develop. ImageNet Roulette, made with Kate Crawford in 2019, was a public-facing web tool that let users upload a selfie and see which categories the venerable ImageNet dataset would assign to them. Many of the categories were racially biased, offensive, or simply absurd — products of the unexamined labor of the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers who had originally labeled ImageNet a decade earlier. The tool went viral. Within weeks, ImageNet's maintainers had removed 600,000 images from the Person category, effectively conceding the point. Paglen's practice has extended through subsequent works — Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, From Apple to Anomaly, his Linux-based surveillance-art research — that continue to map the political infrastructure of machine vision. His work with Crawford (her 2021 book Atlas of AI is essential reading) has extended the critical framing from art-world settings into broader policy debate. He continues to work. He is based in Berlin. Lore Paglen trained as a geographer at Berkeley before his art practice became full-time. His photography of NSA and CIA infrastructure in the American Southwest (Blank Spots on the Map) is continuous with the AI work — both are investigations of systems that try to remain unseen. The ImageNet Roulette incident is one of the cleanest cases of a critical artwork producing concrete corrective changes in the industry it critiqued. Sources • Paglen, Trevor — Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You (The New Inquiry, Dec 2016) • Crawford, Kate — Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021) • Paglen, Trevor — paglen.studio archive