"With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI), we now live in an era where a creator does not necessarily have to exist behind a work of art. In the past, we tried to filter out fake information, but now we have shifted to an era of finding 'the real' under the assumption that all information is false."
Contemporary artist Trevor Paglen made these remarks during an interview at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, New York, on the 14th (local time). "When the war in Iran began, I realized that my way of thinking had changed as I tried to grasp the situation through social network services (SNS)," he said. Paglen argued, "In autonomous vehicles, automated quality control systems in factories, and facial recognition systems at airports, machines generate images for other machines—and this is a very unfamiliar shift in that these are images humans don't need to see." He added, "Because this can have a profound impact on culture, society, and politics as a whole, we must consider how to avoid negative consequences."
Paglen is a world-renowned media artist who creates works that visualize the power structures and surveillance systems embedded in AI and digital technology through photography, video, and sculpture. His representative work, "From Apple to Anomaly" — known in Korean as "Faces of ImageNet" (2022) — starkly revealed how discriminatory AI can be in judging people by reverse-engineering algorithms that classify individuals in photographs, exposing how AI learns biases. In 2019, through the audience-participation project "ImageNet Roulette," he exposed how AI analyzes people's appearances and learns biases based on race, gender, and physical features. In recognition of these contributions, Paglen received the LG Guggenheim Award on this day. Now in its fourth year, the LG Guggenheim Award is presented to artists who lead creative innovation through the use of technology, and is a flagship collaborative program between LG (003550) and the Guggenheim Museum.
When asked what winning the LG Guggenheim Award means to him, Paglen replied, "I hope it can inspire other artists." He was named a MacArthur Fellow — known as the "Genius Grant" — in 2017, and also received the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2018. "My work does not follow the traditional method of painting beautiful pictures inside a studio, but rather an investigation-centered approach that involves collaborating with people from various fields," he said. "Because I believe this way of working can contribute to society, I hope it serves as an opportunity for other artists to broaden their possibilities."
