Artist Trevor Paglen’s new book offers timely take on technology’s hijacking of visual culture

Artist Trevor Paglen’s new book compiles his writings from the past decade on how computer vision and generative media have transformed visual culture and its relationship to power. The book argues that today’s digital images increasingly function as “operational” tools—interfaces used by corporate and state systems—rather than primarily as representations, and that this shift may be more consequential than earlier revolutions such as perspective or photography. Paglen explains how computer vision converts the visible world into machine-readable abstractions that enable technologies like facial recognition, license-plate reading, and large-scale monitoring, creating an expanding machine-to-machine image ecosystem. The essays contend that existing theories for interpreting images are becoming obsolete and must be updated to address what images are doing in society, not only what they depict.

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