TREVOR PAGLEN

With a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley, Paglen has written several books and numerous articles on experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. He contributed research and cinematography to Laura Poitras’s Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour (2014), which focused on Edward Snowdon, and his work has been profiled in leading publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Artforum. His honours include the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award (2014), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2016), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2017), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award in 2014, honoring him as a groundbreaking investigative artist. His work is included in important institutional and private collections from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to the Victoria and Albert Museum in, London.

In 2026, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation announced Paglen as the recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award, which honours artists who engage critically with technology and provides 100,000 USD in unrestricted support. The Guggenheim cited his sustained exploration of surveillance systems, data infrastructures, and machine vision, and highlighted how his work mirrors the museum’s own research into the social and aesthetic implications of emerging technologies. In the same year, his book How to See Like a Machine was scheduled for release by Verso on 19 May 2026.

Early life and ‘experimental georgraphy’

Paglen was born in 1974 on an Air Force base in Camp Springs, Maryland, and spent his childhood moving between US and European military installations, an experience that later informed his scrutiny of secrecy, militarism, and surveillance infrastructure. He studied religious studies and music composition before completing a BA in Religious Studies at UC Berkeley in 1996, then, from the early 2000s, pursued graduate studies that led to an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley in 2008.

Paglen began to describe his approach as ‘experimental geography’, referring to the term in an article in wrote for The Brooklyn Rail in 2009, his practice becoming associated particularly with the consideration of space and how power organises and controls society through borders, surveillance, and logistics, and specifically the ‘geography and aesthetics of the American surveillance system’. Early work such as the photographic series Black Sites (c. 2003–2006) documenting classified military compounds, CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ prisons like the Salt Pit near Kabul, and other restricted zones established him within debates on post-9/11 security and visual culture and paved the way for later projects.

Works, series, Themes and Methods

Paglen’s projects typically begin with painstaking research—sifting public records, declassified documents, flight logs, amateur tracking data, and technical manuals—before this material is translated into photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations. His training in geography underpins this method, treating fieldwork, data analysis, and collaboration with specialists as core components of the artwork rather than background preparation. Below is a discussion of examples of Paglen’s different series:

• In the early 2000s, Paglen developed a ‘Limit Telephotography’ (c. 2000–2012) photographic series, turning extremely long-range telescopes toward distant U.S. military ‘black sites’, much of which can be found deep in the American deserts, where classified military bases and weapon ranges litter the remotest landscapes. Working from publicly accessible land, he used custom optical setups to picture military runways, hangars, and aircraft otherwise hidden by distance. The resulting images are hazy, streaked, or distorted by heat and dust, transforming technical limitations into a visual language that emphasises how secrecy is structurally maintained at the edge of optical legibility.
• Paglen’s ongoing series ‘The Other Night Sky’ (mid-2000s–ongoing) tracks classified U.S. reconnaissance satellites. Combining orbital data from amateur satellite watchers with astronomical software, he calculates precise flight paths, then makes long-exposure photographs of the night sky as these satellites pass overhead. In the finished works, fine luminous trails cut through otherwise familiar constellations, updating the American landscape tradition—after figures like Timothy O’Sullivan and Ansel Adams—by showing a militarised firmament in which spy satellites quietly occupy the same vistas.
• In the early 2010s, Paglen turned to the physical infrastructure of the internet, global data and mass surveillance. In ‘Landing Site’ and ‘Cable works’ series of works he focuses on submarine cables and NSA-related sites identifying likely cable routes and interception points, travelling to landing stations, listening posts, and server farms, and learning to scuba dive to locate and photograph fibre-optic cables. Large-format photographs of encrusted cables, coastal bunkers, and seemingly anonymous industrial buildings reveal how global communications networks and surveillance programmes are embedded in ordinary landscapes of beaches, fields, and office parks.
• In around 2012, Paglen began making works related to ‘The Last Pictures’ series—inspired by an image that came from his work tracking secret satellites—Paglen realised that certain kinds of satellites – those in geosynchronous orbits – experience virtually no drag from the atmosphere below and consequently stay in orbit for extremely long amounts of time – millions or billions of years. Working with cultural theorists, scientists, and engineers, he assembled a set of 100 images drawn from art history, scientific imaging, and contemporary media, then micro-etched them onto a gold-plated disc attached to a communications satellite. Designed to remain in geostationary orbit for millions of years, the disc functions as a speculative time capsule, asking what traces of human culture might survive long after life on Earth has changed or disappeared.
• Shifting from infrastructure to material residues, the sculpture Trinity Cube (2015) brings together irradiated glass from buildings in Fukushima’s exclusion zone and Trinitite, the vitrified sand created by the first U.S. atomic bomb test at Trinity, New Mexico. Cast into a glowing minimalist cube, the work compresses geographically distant nuclear events into a single object, linking military testing and civilian disaster while quietly echoing the aesthetics of modernist sculpture.
• From 2020 onwards, Paglen has increasingly examined artificial intelligence and computer-vision systems in projects such as Bloom (2020) and Deep Semantic Image Segments (2020–ongoing). In Bloom, he processes photographic and dataset material through custom machine-learning pipelines that iteratively generate dense, colour-saturated fields, printed at large scale so that viewers are immersed in seemingly abstract ‘blooms’ that are in fact shaped by statistical operations. In Deep Semantic Image Segments, he uses semantic-segmentation networks to carve photographs into algorithmically defined zones, which he re-renders as planes of colour and fractured contours, visualising how AI parses scenes into actionable parts. Installed as monumental prints or screen-based environments, these works foreground the gap between human perception and machine interpretation and point to the political stakes of computer vision in facial recognition, predictive policing, and biometric surveillance.

Across these bodies of work, Paglen continually links technical processes—telescopic optics, orbital tracking, underwater imaging, and machine-learning pipelines—to questions of space, secrecy, infrastructure, and power.

Paglen’s notion of ‘seeing like a machine’, developed further in his forthcoming book How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, frames contemporary visual culture as a contested field in which algorithms, states, and corporations define what counts as recognisable or normal. By collaborating with technologists and civil-liberties organisations, he links his images and installations to wider debates on human rights, transparency, and the ethics of automation without reducing his work to straightforward illustration or didactic critique.

Exhibitions, Collections and Recognition

Paglen has presented major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC (with a tour to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego), the Barbican Centre in London, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Fondazione Prada in Milan, Vienna Secession, the San José Museum of Art, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. His work has also appeared in significant group shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and numerous international biennials, positioning him as a key reference in discussions of surveillance art and critical approaches to technology and art.

Trevor Paglen FAQs

Ocula | 2026