Giving Compass' Take:

• Artnet interviews Trevor Paglen, an innovative artist who is using artificial intelligence to transform the realities that we currently live in, and as he puts, "an investigation of being invisible."

• How can art help to change perspective?

• Read about another  artist, Lorna Simpson, who creates art that deals with race, gender, and identity.

One of the art world’s more intrepid figures, Trevor Paglen has ventured near unmapped prisons where terrorism suspects are subjected to brutal interrogations. He’s also gone to sites like Area 51, a secretive military base in the desert of Nevada, widely thought to be a testing ground for experimental aircraft, in order to take photographs that explore the edge of what is visible.

Paglen’s preoccupations include the physical structure of the Internet and the extent to which it allows governments to spy on their citizens, and the possibilities we can find to wriggle free of those spying efforts. One might think of many of his projects as “watching the watchers,” but Paglen himself has said that he prefers to think of his body of work as an investigation into what invisibility looks like.

Paglen spoke to artnet News about his eerie recent photographs that show pictures drawn by computers; the ways that he enlists visibility and invisibility to different purposes in varying images; and how he’s a fan of Black Mirror.

Let’s start off by talking about the work that you’re doing with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Were those works at all intended to remove the artist’s hand from the production of the work?

Actually, when you look under the hood at how AI is actually done, it requires tremendous amounts of human labor. To create those images you need massive training sets. In my case, I need hundreds, or even thousands, of images to create a training set that I use to make one of these pieces. You assemble those images and then label them and tag them in order to teach the AI what these images are.

Read the full article about using artificial intelligence in art by Brian Bouche at artnet news