How to See Like a Machine - Trevor Paglen

Name: How to See Like a Machine - Trevor Paglen
Brand: Verso Books
SKU: 9781836742166
Price: 24.95 USD
Availability: InStock

Verso Books

$24.95

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How to See Like a Machine by Trevor Paglen / 192-page hardback published in 2026 by Verso / ISBN 9781836742166

***

We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking at us. By the award-winning artist, filmmaker and thinker.

Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cameras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies “say” about the world, he teaches us to ask what they “do” and where such images come from.

Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this apparently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.

"In this indispensable compilation, Trevor Paglen traces the fate of photographic images in the age of cognitive warfare, AI slop and pictorial conditioning. Decades of propaganda, psyops and photoshop have successively rid images of reality. Generative AI automates this process to create statistical renderings in a state of superposition; neither true nor false, but optimized to mess with human minds. When seeing becomes acting, thinking and theory need to involve actual visual practice, too. Paglens invaluable hands-on method of inquiry documents a shift in focus from images of reality to the reality of images. Required reading."—Hito Steyerl, author of Medium Hot

"Paglen is an extraordinary artist and thinker. In these succinct, entertaining essays he broadens our understanding of vision, and shows how image-making is leaving the human eye behind"—Hari Kunzru, author of Blue Ruin

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