Sight Machine

“I really don’t think art is good at answering questions — it’s much better at posing questions, and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes, which, for me, is kind of the point of art,” the

American artist Trevor Paglen told The New York Times. 

Paglen works across multiple disciplines, and often finds ways to employ them in the same work. One such discipline is investigative journalism, within which he monitors and documents government surveillance activity, in particular the CIA’s infamous practice of “extraordinary rendition”, its extrajudicial programme for abducting and detaining suspected terrorists.

He recently teamed up with the Kronos Quartet, the avant-garde ensemble whose four members are as adventurous as the artist himself, and their collaboration resulted in Sight Machine, a multimedia performance centred around artificial intelligence. As the quartet performs a set of compositions by Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson, a processed video feed of the musicians is projected onto a screen behind them, allowing the audience to compare what they see to what an algorithm is “seeing”. 

“Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic and intellectual level,” says Paglen.

His goal with Sight Machine, however, is to use the visual discrepancy to pose an important question: what are the social, ethical, economic and political consequences of allowing artificial intelligence to look at the world on our behalf? Paglen: “Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. We’re now handing over the ability to tell those stories to artificial intelligence networks and machine-vision systems. My work on machine vision has to do with learning how to ask the right questions about the new relationships between images and power that we see developing throughout society.”

The world is no longer just what we see, observes Paglen, “and the advent of computer vision is changing our relationship to images.” More and more of our daily activity is being monitored, recorded and turned into metadata, and this has far-reaching consequences for us individually and collectively, and for the entire structure of society. May art open our eyes.