Trevor Paglen: Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations

How machine and computer vision produces contemporary images.

Although often considered to be a fault or a glitch in the system, the event of hallucination is central to the models of image production generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Through mining the latent space of computer vision, Trevor Paglen’s series Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017-ongoing) reveals this phantasmal and hallucinatory domain. In the conversation included in this volume, he discusses how we can think from within these opaque structures and, in turn, questions the frequently inflated claims made on behalf of automated image-production systems. In an accompanying essay, Anthony Downey explores the uncanny realm of algorithmically induced images and proposes that AI, through its generative modeling of the world, invariably estranges us from the present and the future.