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Trevor Paglen filters photos of blooming trees through bespoke computational processes, explains Kyle Chayka, Author at artnet News.
View of Trevor Paglen’s exhibition “Bloom,” 2020, at Pace Gallery.
Courtesy Trevor Paglen and Pace Gallery.
Photo: Damian Griffiths
You feel the subtle effects of algorithms while using digital platforms: Spotify automatically plays another song based on what you already like; Instagram shows you the stories first from the accounts you interact with most often; and TikTok, dispensing with agency entirely, just gives you a feed of videos “For You,” no choice about who to follow required. Algorithms are designed so that you don’t necessarily recognize their effects and can’t always tell whether or not they’re modifying your behavior. A new body of work by the interdisciplinary artist and technology activist Trevor Paglen—on view at Pace Gallery’s London venue, with a virtual version online—attempts to visualize their workings.
“Bloom” is a series of high-resolution photographs of flowering trees. The sprays of blossoms are tinted different colors in variegated sections, a slightly nauseating spectrum of reds, yellows, blues, and purples. The colors are the biggest sign that something inhuman has happened: they don’t seem to follow a single logic and their arrangements are too granular to have been executed by hand. As Paglen explains in a video published by Pace, the colors have been assigned by machine-learning algorithms developed by his studio that dissect the images’ textures and spatial arrangements, then apply colors to mark differences. Flowers might stay bright white while the trees’ leaves and branches recede into blues. Looking at the images means trying to decode what the computer was evaluating when adding color.
Flowers are a perennial artistic subject, from the Dutch Baroque memento mori that Paglen references in the video to Andy Warhol’s screen prints. But his visualize how a machine perceives an image...
“Bloom” shows that beauty can’t be automated—at least, not by the technology we currently have. More than a series of visual alignments or colors, beauty lies in our memories of the world, the connection of a flower to the experience of spring inevitably passing. Algorithms lack any understanding of this context; they can only approximate it.
Source: ARTnews
