Trevor Paglen has photographed drones and secret bases, and now he is exploring the gaze of AI

Trevor Paglen has spent his career moving across photography, installation, sculpture, and writing, investigating the invisible infrastructures of surveillance, intelligence systems, and artificial intelligence. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Venice Biennale. In 2025, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. This year, he was appointed co-curator of Zero10, Art Basel's section dedicated to art in the digital age, which makes its Swiss debut at the fair this week. On the eve of Art Basel 2026, we met with him to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping the role of the artist—and why, in his view, we shouldn't be afraid of it.

“I’ve always considered myself an artist. That’s how I’ve thought of myself my whole life. I made music for a long time, studied music, and worked for a while as a sound engineer. Then I went to art school because what I was doing with music wasn’t really music anymore — we were making multimedia performances, and at some point I realized I had moved beyond that field. Later, after art school, I did a PhD in geography, mainly because I wanted my artistic practice to be more rigorous. I felt that kind of training would help me as an artist.” Since then, he says, the way he thinks about art has not changed much. “I’ve always tried to explore a changing world and create ways to see it. It’s a very simple goal, really,” he says, almost shrugging — and listening to him, one might suspect it is easier said than done. In Area 52; Tonopah Test Range, NV (2006), he climbed a mountain in Nevada in winter with a long-range telescopic lens to photograph a secret military base from twenty miles away. The result is an image that struggles to reveal what it depicts: “The representation is falling apart. I like to stand on the line between something you can name and something you can’t.” The same tension runs through Untitled (Reaper Drones) (2009), a red-and-purple dawn sky that only the title reveals to be a photograph of combat drones — and which, at that moment, ceases to be a landscape and becomes a war photograph. More recently, CLOUD #395 (2025) inscribes the marks of computer vision algorithms onto a cloudy sky: not a pun on cloud computing, but a warning about how easy it is to mistake artificial intelligence for superior intelligence. “Every discipline offers a lens through which to view the world. One of the things I try to do is see it in as many ways as possible. Sometimes that simply means borrowing someone else’s glasses.”

There comes a point, however, when this curiosity focuses on a specific problem that still haunts his work today: how machines learn to see. “I became interested in computer vision in the late 2000s, when facial recognition was just starting to work. I could see a future rapidly approaching in which the very meaning of seeing, and of images, would change radically. We would be entering a world where most images were produced by machines for other machines, and much of that would remain invisible to us, because it was happening within a digital infrastructure layer.” From that same insight, nearly twenty years later, came his latest book, How to See Like a Machine. “The argument is that, over the last fifteen years, we have gone through two major revolutions in our relationship with images: first, the maturation of computer vision, and then generative artificial intelligence.” “When I was in art school, we read Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes — extraordinary material, but I don’t think you get very far if you try to use Barthes to think about today’s computer vision systems. The book tries to develop a vocabulary for thinking about our changed relationship with images.” The title, he explains, is a provocation. “Computer vision systems and image-generation systems operate in ways that are foreign to our traditional understanding of how images work. To understand how they are changing the world around us, we need to understand what they are actually doing — how they see, so to speak.”

“How has all this changed art? I don’t think anyone has a convincing answer yet. But among my artist friends, it’s pretty much the only thing we talk about.” The disorientation is real, and Paglen doesn’t try to downplay it. “It’s a big question for anyone working in the creative industries: what does it mean to be an artist when there can be art without artists, texts without authors, photographs without photographers — or even without cameras? It’s a deeply disorienting situation.” Yet, as he points out, this would not be the first time art has undergone a radical transformation. Every era leaves its mark on art through its own way of seeing the world, which is precisely why it continues to speak to us. “I think this happens with all art. When we look at Cubism, we see the early 20th century. When we look at Abstract Expressionism, we recognize the postwar era. It’s a characteristic of art, not a flaw. In fact, it’s an extraordinary thing, because it allows us to see through time and understand how people looked at the world at different moments. We always have something to learn from this. We still read 19th-century novels and plays from thousands of years ago because there is an accumulation of culture, stories, and ways of seeing that we pass on not only to our contemporaries, but also through history. I doubt humanity will stop doing this because of AI.” Here, the discussion returns to perception: if images preserve the way an era looked at the world, the question today becomes how that way of looking is altered by our constant interaction with machines. It is no coincidence that Paglen’s most recent works move precisely in this direction. “I’m thinking about how our interactions with machines change our cognition, our ways of perceiving. I’m looking at experiments with the supernatural and their relationship to perception, and I’m working a lot with neuroscientists, trying to measure perception — literally thinking about whether we can build models based on the visual cortex and use them to generate new images. I’m looking at things like military psychological operations and magic. The work on hypnosis exhibited at Palazzo Diedo in Venice is part of that same line.”

This year, Paglen co-curated Zero10 alongside digital art strategist Eli Scheinman, Art Basel’s global initiative dedicated to art in the digital age. Now in its third edition, and making its debut at the Swiss fair, the section brings together twenty exhibitors in the Event Hall at Messeplatz. Its theme, The Condition, already suggests a shift in perspective: not a technology to be explored as an exception, but a condition in which we are already deeply immersed. “This is the third edition of Zero10. The first two were very focused on what we might call post-blockchain artists — generally younger artists working entirely in the digital realm, without there necessarily being a physical manifestation of the work. This year’s thesis is that what we call digital art is not new at all. In fact, most of the art of the last twenty years is, in a sense, digital art. All the painters I know prepare their paintings in Photoshop. All the sculptors I know design their work in three-dimensional environments. Photography is now almost entirely digital. The world is made of digital matter: there are far more digital cameras than human eyes, and thousands of times more transistors than insects.” To continue treating the digital as an exception, then, means losing the ability to read the present. “The thesis of the exhibition is: let’s acknowledge that this transformation took place a long time ago, and let’s try to tell a different history of art using that framework. Let’s see what happens.”

The same question — where creative intervention takes place today — also runs through Strange Rules, the group exhibition at Palazzo Diedo curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli, open through November 22, 2026, in which Paglen participates as an artist. The project revolves around Protocol Art: the idea that, in the age of artificial intelligence, the artwork may no longer coincide solely with the image produced, but also with the instructions, models, and systems that make it possible. “We are all trying to understand what it means to make art in the age of artificial intelligence. Perhaps the answer is no longer just in the image. When anyone can write a prompt and make an image appear, are we sure that is where the most interesting work is being done? Or do we need to move one level up and start thinking of the models or protocols behind those images as works in themselves?” For Paglen, this is not a new idea. “When I started working with generative AI, around the mid-2010s, we were building a lot of models in the studio. Once you created a model, you could generate as many images as you wanted. I’ve always considered those models to be works of art. Back then, if I had told someone I wanted to sell a machine learning model as an artwork, they probably would not have understood what I was talking about. Today, that position is becoming more and more legitimate.”

Nor is the idea entirely new historically. In a sense, Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky had already attempted to address similar questions in 1971 with the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement — a contract designed to protect artists’ economic interests even after the sale of a work. “There is much to learn from those moments of experimentation, not so much from the specific solutions they found as from their approach. Beyond the image, new protocols such as blockchain allow us to rethink how other levels of the system function. We have seen this with many NFT artists, who have imagined entirely alternative economies.” At the same time, the institutional art world often remains slow to embrace the forms of experimentation artists are already pursuing. “It’s inevitable: institutions are conservative by nature. There are, however, brilliant exceptions worth continuing to follow.” “When I was in art school, in critiques we were told that art was what was inside the frame, and that everything outside the frame was not part of the work. That always seemed absurd to me. There is so much outside the frame. And it is necessary to understand that in order to understand what is inside.”