Trevor Paglen

Artist

Trevor Paglen · paglen.studio ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/trevor-paglen ↗

Based

Born 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland. Lives and works in New York

Practice

Photography, moving image, sculpture, research, writing, and computational art focused on surveillance, machine vision, and hidden infrastructures

Now

Recipient of the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award

In the set

PRELUDES ↗ · 250 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Trevor Paglen works where conceptual art, investigative research, geography, and engineering meet. Born in Camp Springs, Maryland, in 1974, he studied art and geography, ultimately earning a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. The Smithsonian American Art Museum describes his practice as a fusion of art, science, and investigative journalism that creates unfamiliar ways of interpreting the world.¹ This formulation identifies the central operation of his work: Paglen does not simply reveal secret objects. He studies the visual, political, and technical systems that decide what can be seen.

His subjects have included classified military installations, reconnaissance satellites, undersea communications cables, image-training datasets, and artificial intelligence. The MacArthur Foundation, which named him a fellow in 2017, emphasized his use of image-making, public records, and declassified documents to examine infrastructures of warfare, surveillance, and social control.² Across these projects, photography is both evidence and a problem. A distant, blurred installation may document a real site while demonstrating the limits imposed on the observer.

Images at the threshold

Paglen’s mid-career survey, Sites Unseen, brought early photographic series together with sculpture and work involving artificial intelligence. The exhibition framed concealment as characteristic of the historical present and linked his practice to debates about privacy, surveillance, and democracy.³ His photographs of drones and intelligence facilities often retain the seductions of landscape photography, even as their subjects expose how territory is organized by military and computational power.

That tension extends into machine vision. In It Began as a Military Experiment, Paglen selected portraits from a United States Department of Defense dataset used in the development of facial-recognition technology. MoMA’s account explains how marked facial features made people legible to an algorithm, converting human subjects into data for systems of identification and control.⁴ Here the image no longer primarily addresses a human spectator. It participates in an operational process, teaching a machine how to classify.

PRELUDES as score and cipher

Released through Art Blocks on April 5, 2023, PRELUDES comprises exactly 250 editions.⁵ Each work combines an original generative musical composition with an animated visual score. Pace’s technical account identifies John Cage and Iannis Xenakis among Paglen’s precedents, alongside composers who encoded messages in music. A custom compositional algorithm determines harmonic structures, rhythms, instruments, and other variations, while Tone.js produces the music. Each edition contains twelve bars, and its notational forms respond to when, how long, and how loudly notes sound.⁶

The series is therefore not an illustration of music but a coordinated system of sound, notation, animation, and code. Its visual language recalls experimental systems of twentieth-century musical notation, turning the screen into both score and interface. The 250 outputs vary across musical style, key, scale, instrumentation, and linear or circular notation. These controlled differences locate authorship in the design of a possibility space rather than in a single fixed composition.

Live on Art Blocks: preludes-by-trevor-paglen ↗

Secrets in plain hearing

Cryptography connects PRELUDES to Paglen’s longer investigation of hidden systems. Pace reports that the interactive works contain embedded secrets and prompts collectors to decipher them, making cryptographic discovery part of the project’s mechanics.⁶ The work consequently oscillates between immediate sensory experience and withheld information. A viewer can listen and watch without solving anything, but the possibility of a concealed message changes every note and mark into potential evidence.

This structure echoes Paglen’s treatment of military insignia, satellites, and surveillance architecture. MoMA’s discussion of Five Classified Aircraft describes unofficial patches as an esoteric visual language associated with classified programs.⁷ In both those emblems and PRELUDES, information is publicly visible without necessarily being intelligible. Access does not guarantee understanding.

Paglen’s practice ultimately asks who constructs systems of visibility, who can interpret their outputs, and whose interests those systems serve. His work has moved from cameras trained on secret landscapes to artworks about images made for machines. PRELUDES adds listening to that inquiry. Its scores are elegant, playful, and variable, yet they also train attention on code, convention, and concealment. The project turns generative art into a compact lesson about reading systems whose operations exceed their surfaces.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Trevor Paglen links page ↗.