TREVOR PAGLEN

Bringing together a selection of prints and polaroids, this show will explore the relationships between UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) sightings, Artificial Intelligence, and the rise of disinformation in today’s media environment—which has all but obliterated the notion of ‘truth.’ As Paglen has said, we live in “a historical moment wherein our relationships to text, images, information, and media are being entirely upended,” and UFOs, deployed by the US military and intelligence agencies as psychological instruments since the 1950s, “blur lines between perception, imagination, and ‘objective’ reality, whatever that may or may not be.”

The artist, whose rigorous practice spans photography, sculpture, video, and installation, is known for his investigations of invisible phenomena and forces, including technological, scientific, socio-political, and historical subjects. Through his work, Paglen has explored Artificial Intelligence, surveillance, data collection, and militarism in America, meditating on the ways these issues influence modes of perceiving and relating to the natural world—from the landscapes of the US to the cosmological realms beyond the Earth.

“UFOs live in the latent space between the material, the sensible, and the perceptual,” Paglen said of his enduring interest in the history of UFO photography. “They inhabit the crossroads of fear, desire, logic, and hope. They produce communities of believers and debunkers, and dreams of divine salvation, endless energy, impossible physics, dark conspiracies, and existential fears.”

The otherworldly, entirely undoctored photographs on view at Pace in New York this summer depict diminutive UFOs amid sprawling landscapes near US military test sites and training bases in California and Utah, including one near Robert Smithson’s seminal land artwork Spiral Jetty. Paglen has been capturing his UFO images since 2002, often while carrying out research and site visits for other projects. Exploiting the hyper memetic qualities of the UFO, he insists on the mysteries of his images by withholding information about what exactly he has captured—in some cases, the contents of these photographs are unknown to the artist as well.

He produced these photographs with various cameras: a Phillips Compact II 8x10, a Wista 4x5 field camera, a Pentax medium-format handheld, a Canon 35mm, and two digital medium-format cameras, one modified to shoot infrared. Most of the works in this series were shot on analog Kodak Portra, T-Max, or Fuji FP Instant film.

Paglen’s UFO photographs can be understood in conversation with his body of images of “unids,” or “unidentifieds”—the many hundreds of unknown objects in orbit around the Earth that are monitored and tracked by the US military—which he captured using infrared telescopes in remote locations. Atmospheric and mysterious, these skyscapes, which figured in Paglen’s 2023 solo show with Pace in New York, show the light trails of “unids,” drawing out the abstracted, textural qualities of the cosmos.

Concurrent with his exhibition of UFO photographs at Pace, Paglen is presenting work in the group exhibition The World Through AI, on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris through September 21.

Photo: Axel Dupeux