Paglen’s process is all about making invisible systems tangible, traceable, and trackable. With an artistic practice that blends geography, photography, technology, and scientific research, Paglen is most known for exposing hidden state surveillance, covert military infrastructures, and biases within artificial intelligence. His work—often many years in the making—takes the form of a photography series that has been launched into outer space and radioactive public sculptures. This has led to such honors such as a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and the LG Guggenheim Award this year.

Paglen began honing this way of seeing while studying art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He treated his time on campus as a grounds for experimenting with mediums, like music, digital audio, and photography. He also took theoretical classes to develop new philosophies and approaches to guide his artistic practice. However, he became frustrated by how often people labeled “art” as what lay within the frame while the conditions that produced it—labor, infrastructure, money, technology—were not. This led him to pursue a PhD in geography.

“Geography is the study of how humans change the surface of the earth and our environments,” Paglen explained. “Within that context, you can study anything from paleoclimatology to film, right? These are all things that have transformed us because we’ve transformed them. There’s a huge range of stuff you can think about from an art perspective.” 

This way of thinking greatly informed Paglen’s approach to documenting the secret operations organized by the United States after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Shortly after the US declared the War on Terror, Paglen began his research on hidden infrastructures built by the US to combat terrorism, including a network of secret prisons used to hold suspected terrorists. Using early forms of open-source intelligence gathering, or OSIG, he tracked publicly available flight data to identify planes that were transporting terrorism suspects, then used those movements to reconstruct where secret operations may have taken place. Starting in 2005, he set out to see them in person and began embedding himself in the field. His travels took him to Kabul, Afghanistan; a snowy mountain top in Tikaboo Peak, Nevada; and Las Vegas, all so he could document the prisons and the movement of prisoners between them. 

Paglen published the flight logs and data he used to track the flights, alongside photographs of the tail numbers of planes flown in the operations, in his project CIA Rendition Flights (2001–06). This work was displayed at MoMA PS1 in New York and throughout Los Angeles on the city’s billboards. Additionally, Paglen and journalist A.C. Thompson, who he worked with closely during his investigations, wrote and published Torture Taxi together, which became the first major book to document this CIA program. The Black Sites (2006), a collection of photos of military and intelligence facilities taken with high-powered telescopes, became a career-defining series for Paglen and was shown in museums and galleries around the globe, most recently in the Smithsonian American Museum and at the Jessica Silverman Gallery as part of Paglen’s career-spanning solo exhibition The Horizon Waved, and Nothing Was Certain: 2006–2026.

Each project Paglen pursues begins the same way: with in-depth research. Paglen constantly reads technical papers and peer-reviewed articles. He also relies on the expertise of others to keep him informed, stays in touch with field experts, and hires people like data scientists to help him in his studio. However, what he looks for as an artist differs from what an academic would look for in a similar field.

“What differentiates [what I do] from scholarship is that I’m personally interested in finding allegories or metaphors,” Paglen said. “I look for moments in those fields where I see something that stands in for the whole or that points to something else.”

Searching for a deeper meaning was one of his primary motivations for investigating artificial intelligence. When Paglen turned his attention to analyzing AI training datasets like ImageNet and WordNet with the help of researcher Kate Crawford, he focused on learning what images are used to train machines and what categories they create, which revealed how AI had come to inherit human prejudices. Paglen and Crawford presented their discoveries through public art installations, critical essays, and the ImageNet Roulette, an online application that allowed users to upload their selfies to see how AI would categorize them. The automated results often categorized these selfies using racist, misogynistic, and overall offensive categories.

His recent Guggenheim Foundation award, which provides him with unrestricted support for his work, arrives at a moment when more and more people are asking how rapidly technologies are shaping who we are on a fundamental level. The $100,000 prize from the award ensures that Paglen can continue to investigate our modern world in his own unique way. Each new article read reveals another subtopic to explore. Each conversation with an expert reveals what’s at stake. And with his current work, each hour inside the fMRI machine lets Paglen witness the activity that happens in our brain, so he can try to find some answers to his latest questions.

Paglen’s time inside of the fMRI has already revealed an enlightening discovery. His amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotion, reacts positively when shown images of tiny planes flying in large, expansive skies. What this reveals about our social media feed’s influence on our brain is still unknown. Perhaps this response itself will turn into evidence that shapes Paglen’s future work. For Paglen, it affirms his enduring fascination with looking for something not yet in clear view. “I have a lot of work that looks like that.” Paglen remarked, referring to the image of flying planes. “I was like ‘oh, my god. I feel seen.’” ■