Trevor Paglen : Bloom

Thoughtful exhibition at Pace Gallery of new work by Trevor Paglen.

I loved the enhanced images of flowers an plants in this show which reminded me of Dutch still lives and indeed, in the excellent video on the website, Paglen points out the work is talking about the fragility of life during Covid and the momento mori aspect of those Dutch pictures.

Those works were enhanced using an AI technique and other works in the show discuss aspect of AI. The giant head in the centre is based on the standard head used as a base for facial recognitions. One picture, which at first glance is a series of stripes is made up of tiny pictures in sequence of people from surveillance cameras. Another work references a data set for teaching machines to read handwriting based on children writing out the Declaration of Independence.

This show reads like an installation as it has an interactive element of camera’s around the gallery livestreaming people viewing the works while it is open and giving you the ability from home to project your webcam image to screens in the corners of the gallery. Is this the future of exhibitions?

Closes 10 November 2020 

Review

Guardian


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