How to See Like a Machine

Paglen’s ideas are smart and suggestive, with the added virtue of being expressed in prose so clear it makes the opacity of other theoretical writing feel like a psyop. This lucidity not only makes his work readable but also staves off the perception that discourse about UFOs and the CIA must be riddled with conspiratorial paranoia… even as Paglen demonstrates how machine vision is shifting our media paradigms, he also demonstrates how human vision can help us navigate the shifts. – Louis Bury * Art in America *
Paglen moves through psyops, UFO imagery, adtech, and recommendation algorithms to argue that the shift underway isn’t just about fake images, but about images that require no human eye at all. For anyone trying to make sense of what’s happening in the current digital and A.I. age, this is an equally readable and rigorous guide. – Books Our Editors Can’t Wait to Read This Summer * Cultured *
How will people choose to interact with art in a world where AI can spit out any image desired? When digital platforms value hyperpersonalization over discovery and learn through user surveillance? AI is altering visual culture more insidiously than it even seems, far beyond slop and plagiarism, and we need to understand it. * Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2026 *
To be literate today means to come to terms with how the twin technical transformations of our time, computer vision and generative AI, work, and how they work on us: how they have reformatted our perception and cognition, our labor and leisure, our representations and realities, and will continue to do so with ever greater intensity. There is no better guide than Trevor Paglen, our most exploratory of artists, who, for two decades, has cracked open each new version of this black box, exposing proprietary abuses, inventing critical terms, devising counter uses, and imagining alternative futures. How to See Like a Machine is the toolkit we need. – Hal Foster, author of What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle
Paglen, whose past work has focused on mass surveillance and data collection, is less interested in how we perceive images online than in how they shape us. Our reactions are measured and fed back into systems that can fine-tune what we see next, ultimately reshaping reality in the process. The real audience is the machines running the show. Learning to see like one of those machines, Paglen writes, is the only way to understand what’s actually going on. – Joshua Brustein * Bloomberg Businessweek *
In this indispensable compilation, Trevor Paglen traces the fate of photographic images in the age of cognitive warfare, AI slop and pictorial conditioning. Decades of propaganda, psyops and photoshop have successively rid images of reality. Generative AI automates this process to create statistical renderings in a state of superposition; neither true nor false, but optimized to mess with human minds. When seeing becomes acting, thinking and theory need to involve actual visual practice, too. Paglens invaluable hands-on method of inquiry documents a shift in focus from images of reality to the reality of images. Required reading. – Hito Steyerl, author of Medium Hot
Paglen is an extraordinary artist and thinker. In these succinct, entertaining essays he broadens our understanding of vision, and shows how image-making is leaving the human eye behind – Hari Kunzru, author of Blue Ruin
A profoundly uncompromising, ambitious, and imaginative read – Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI
Paglen’s work makes the invisible visible. In his new book he looks at images and shows how images look at us. What emerges is a new space for thinking between humans and media. This book is urgent. – Hans Ulrich Obrist
How to See Like a Machine aptly traces a true paradigm shift in visual culture.the book includes essays written over the course of the past fifteen or so years, a time period that has coincided with Paglen’s rather meteoric rise as an artist. * Brooklyn Rail *
As the book’s title suggests, Paglen argues that to remain the masters of our fate, we must all learn how algorithms represent reality. He also says that in an age when tech companies are trying to extract data from us even when we’re asleep, we must stop thinking about privacy as something taken for granted and instead turn it into a deliberate practice, much as you might make an effort to meditate or go to the gym daily: ‘one must create deliberate inefficiencies and spheres of life removed from market and political predations’. * Gizmodo *
Paglen’s essays are impressively cogent, engaging, and relevant … [due to] the importance of this book’s subject and the valuable arguments Paglen makes, [we] recommend this title for all art and politics collections. * Library Journal *
Paglen confronts, with clear prose and a level head, everything from UFOs to psyops, offering a revealing look behind the curtain that you can’t unsee. * Art in America, 7 Books We’re Looking Forward to in May *
Paglen is well-placed to bring news from the more obscure, unexpected sites and sources of present technological predicaments. For the past twenty years, his wide-ranging practice-which includes sculpture, installation, photography, and a prodigious amount of text and talk-has explored the hinterland between secret military technology and the more or less subtle distortions of everyday life that technology eventually wreaks. * 4 Columns *
Paglen took a slightly different approach to reality in the 2010s, photographing military ranges and weapons otherwise unavailable to the public and diving to the undersea cables that constitute the internet. His focus was more directly on materializing the immaterial rather than leaning into the ether. But his approach to visual culture still draws on the image as a tool of manipulation and behavioral effect. How to See Like a Machine is not so much about machine vision, then, as it is about human blindness. * DIrt *

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.

Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues.

His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture.

In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.

Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.

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