Trevor Paglen operates at the crossroads of art, technology, and philosophy. His work explores technologies of image-making as increasingly powerful animators of geopolitical exchange and arbiters of how we see our world and ourselves. Balancing tensions between the visible and invisible, beauty and terror, Paglen reveals the ways digital imagery both mimics traditional forms of representation while spawning unfamiliar and at times unsettling motifs based not on human vision but as logical outcomes of computational processes. Paglen’s fascination is with the “techno-sublime,” as Hal Foster has argued: a revised visualization of nature as both awe-inspiring and threatening—due not to violent weather or what might be imagined to lie beyond the horizon, but to human-wielded technology: spy satellites, Reaper drones, and rendition flights. A student of art history as well as technology and geography, Paglen has said: “I was thinking about 19th-century painting—Turner, Romanticism, monsters in the sky. What are the monsters in our skies now?”

For the romantic poets and painters inspired by Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, awe was found in nature. “Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty,” Burke wrote, for whom the terror inspired by threatening cloud formations or chasms forged a path toward greater consciousness. But as contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton recently observed, there has been a shift toward a greater reverence for technology: we are no longer amazed by nature, “we are mostly amazed by ourselves.”

Trevor Paglen: the most merciful thing in the world features photography, video, and sculpture spanning a twenty-year period, presenting works that activate—through telescopic and computer vision—new ways of seeing the world while revealing what is designed to remain unseen within systems of surveillance or military power. The exhibition subtitle is borrowed from science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937): “the most merciful thing in the world” is our ignorance, which ultimately protects us from fully comprehending the vast and terrifying universe. Across multiple distinct series, this exhibition examines how human interactions with technology—from telescopic views of military sites and the cosmos, to interactive facial-recognition technologies, to the darker prospects of AI-generated imagery and alternate-reality games—test the capacities of human perception and cognition.

The exhibition marks Trevor Paglen’s return to Cincinnati. In 2019, he was the keynote speaker for the FotoFocus symposium AutoUpdate.

Curated by Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator

Press Releases (PDF)