TREVOR PAGLEN: FACES OF IMAGENET

Faces of ImageNet (2022) is an interactive video installation that draws attention to what can go wrong in artificial intelligence. The display surface presents an ever-changing mosaic of faces and labels. When a participant approaches the camera mounted in front of the building, a live video feed of their face appears on the display. The camera captures their portrait, which is then classified by a machine-learning algorithm trained on ImageNet, the most widely used dataset in AI research. The installation displays the resulting label and its definition, alongside images from the dataset that the algorithm matches to the participant’s portrait.

The results can expose the deep biases, racism, and pseudoscientific assumptions embedded in many AI systems. With Faces of ImageNet, Paglen draws attention to what happens when technical systems are trained on problematic data, and how those biases can be reproduced through seemingly objective technologies. The work builds upon an earlier web application developed by Trevor Paglen, ImageNet Roulette.

About the Artist

Trevor Paglen is a New York- and San Francisco-based artist, geographer, and author whose work spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.

He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan.

Paglen has had solo 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, and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern (London), and numerous other venues.

A recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, Paglen was most recently named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award in 2026. His sixth book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After Al, was released by Verso Books in the same year.

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.