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Trevor Paglen
2,364 posts
Trevor Paglen
@trevorpaglen
I'm an artist. Satellites, Deep-Time, Seeing Machines, Infrastructure, etc..
- Artist here with some thoughts on the amazing JWST images. There’s a lot going on in these images that prompt us non-astronomers to be affected by them in ways that are both particular and powerful. A thread… ⤵️
- In the Vietnam War, PSYOP units broadcast bizarre “ghost” recordings into the jungle at night… what does "Operation Wandering Soul" have to do with generative AI? 🧵
- I got interested in computer vision and AI in the early 2010s - after decades of slow progress, CV was starting to "work." I realized that very soon most of the images in the world would be made by machines for other machines. 🧵
- Replying to @trevorpaglenImages don’t “mean” anything in- and of- themselves. The “meaning” of images is always relational, unstable, contextual, historical, and very often political, even and perhaps especially when we don't consciously perceive them as such.
- A genre of “outsider art” I’m interested in is patches and emblems that military special operations and “black” units create. These are rare glimpses into some niches of military culture. One of the sculptures in my new body of work is inspired by designs made by PSYOP units…
- Wow... I'm completely floored... what an incredible honor...
- Replying to @trevorpaglenThe color pallet and compositions in the JWST images make an implicit argument we understand subconsciously: that looking at the depths of the cosmos is akin to looking into the 19th Century American frontier. Aesthetically, they tap into some intense American self-mythologizing.
- Replying to @trevorpaglenElizabeth Kessler, an art historian at Stanford, points out that the Hubble Pallet is very similar to the visual language of 19th Century paintings of the American West, particularly those by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Here book is here: upress.umn.edu/book-division/…
- Congrats Germany! You are brave and powerful. Now give Snowden asylum.
