Art, Politics, and AI in the Time of COVID-19

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. The clandestine and the hidden are revealed in series such as The Black Sites, The Other Night Sky, and Limit Telephotography in which the limits of vision are explored through the histories of landscape photography, abstraction, Romanticism, and technology. Paglen’s investigation into the epistemology of representation can be seen in his Symbology and Code Names series which utilize text, video, object, and image to explore questions surrounding military culture and language. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008, 2010, 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010), and numerous other institutions.

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Kate Crawford

Kate Crawford is a leading academic on the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. Over a 20-year career, her work has focused on understanding large-scale data systems and AI in the wider contexts of history, politics, labor, and the environment. Her Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler – which maps the full lifecycle of a single Amazon Echo from mines in the Congo to e-waste pits in Ghana – won the Beazley Design of the Year Award in 2019, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A Museum in London. 

Crawford is a Distinguished Research Professor at New York University, where she co-founded the AI Now Institute – the first interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is also a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New York, and is the inaugural Visiting Chair in AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. 

Crawford’s research has appeared in Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine.  In 2019, she collaborated with the artist Trevor Paglen to stage the first major exhibition of training data images in AI systems, held at the Fondazione Prada museum in Milan. They followed this with the Making Faces exhibition in Paris in 2020, which addressed the history of facial recognition. Crawford’s forthcoming book is titled Atlas of AI: Extraction, Politics and Power in Artificial Intelligence (2020).