Trevor Paglen - Cornerhouse Publications

"…we have these incredibly predatory institutions being created, whether it is white supremacy on one hand or Facebook on the other. It is kind of a surrealist moment. Nothing is what it seems." For his new Curve commission, American artist Trevor Paglen invites us to take a critical look at how artificial intelligence networks are taught to'perceive' and'see' the world by engineers who provide them with vast training sets of images and words. For his commission Paglen has created a vast mosaic of approximately 30,000 of these images across 100 categories that charts ImageNet's labelling of the world, moving from uncontroversial nouns such as'cloud', 'anchovy' and'apple', to terms that make problematic and prejudiced visual judgements such as'schemer', 'traitor' and'anomaly'.