Aperture Conversations
Trevor Paglen and Noam M. Elcott: The Past, Present, and Future of AI
Tuesday, February 18
6:00 p.m. EST
Join Aperture for a special conversation between artist Trevor Paglen and art historian Noam M. Elcott. The two will discuss the most recent issue of Aperture magazine, “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI,” a timely and urgent issue that explores how artificial intelligence is quickly transforming the field of photography and our broader culture of images.
To weigh the risks and possibilities of this transformative change, Aperture has turned to some of the leading thinkers in the field. Trevor Paglen and researcher Kate Crawford demystify the “intelligence” of AI and outline its threats to privacy, democracy, and the planet. Noam M. Elcott and technologist Tim Trombley train their own AI model on the Farm Security Administration’s vast and storied archive, mimicking photographers like Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks with revelatory precision. Moving beyond hype and hysteria, the essays, interviews, and artist portfolios in this issue provide a crucial resource for understanding the ways in which this fast-evolving technology is reshaping photography’s relationship to creativity, authorship, and truth.
This online public program is free and open to all. Register here. A recording of the event will be available on Aperture’s YouTube channel.
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Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines to explore surveillance and systems of power. The recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” grant in 2017, he is the author of I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World (2007), Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009), and The Last Pictures (2012).
Noam M. Elcott is a scholar of modern art and media whose book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (2016) was awarded the 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. Elcott has two forthcoming books, Photography, Identity, Status: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and Art™: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks. He is an editor of the journal Grey Room and an associate professor in the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology.
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Image: Trevor Paglen, CLOUD #557 | Hough Line Transform; Hough Circle Transform, 2023
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