Multidisciplinary artist Trevor Paglen and art historian Noam M. Elcott present their latest work before launching into a dialogue on the metaphysical dilemmas AI technology poses in our society writ large. Both heavyweights in their own respective fields, the two provided scholarship and images for the latest issue of Aperture magazine, “Image Worlds to Come: Photography & AI.”
Learn more in this kaleidoscopic conversation that jumps from the specificity of working with generative AI models to contemplating Doritos as a delightfully apt metaphor for hyperprocessed images.
This conversation originally took place on February 18, 2025.
Image: Trevor Paglen, CLOUD #557 | Hough Line Transform; Hough Circle Transform, 2023
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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