Trevor Paglen - Invisible Images

5/8/24, 8:38 AM Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) – The New Inquiry
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Invisible Images (Your Pictures

Are Looking at You)
By TREVOR PAGLEN DECEMBER 8, 2016
https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/ 1/14
An audio version of this essay is available to subscribers,

provided by curio.io.
“Winona”
Eigenface (Colorized),
I. Labelled Faces in the Wild
Dataset
OUR eyes are fleshy things, and for most of human 2016
history our visual culture has also been made of

fleshy things. The history of images is a history of pigments and dyes, oils,
acrylics, silver nitrate and gelatin--materials that one could use to paint a cave, a
church, or a canvas. One could use them to make a photograph, or to print
pictures on the pages of a magazine. The advent of screen-based media in the
latter half of the 20th century wasn’t so different: cathode ray tubes and liquid
crystal displays emitted light at frequencies our eyes perceive as color, and
densities we perceive as shape.
We’ve gotten pretty good at understanding the vagaries of human vision; the
serpentine ways in which images infiltrate and influence culture, their tenuous
relationships to everyday life and truth, the means by which they’re harnessed to
serve--and resist--power. The theoretical concepts we use to analyze classical
visual culture are robust: representation, meaning, spectacle, semiosis, mimesis,
and all the rest. For centuries these concepts have helped us to navigate the
workings of classical visual culture.
But over the last decade or so, something dramatic has happened. Visual culture
has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has largely
become invisible. Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an
exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of images are now made by
machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop. The advent of
machine-to-machine seeing has been barely noticed at large, and poorly
understood by those of us who’ve begun to notice the tectonic shift invisibly
taking place before our very eyes.
The landscape of invisible images and machine vision is becoming evermore

active. Its continued expansion is starting to have profound effects on human
life, eclipsing even the rise of mass culture in the mid 20th century. Images have
begun to intervene in everyday life, their functions changing from
representation and mediation, to activations, operations, and enforcement.
Invisible images are actively watching us, poking and prodding, guiding our
movements, inflicting pain and inducing pleasure. But all of this is hard to see.
Cultural theorists have long suspected there was something different about
digital images than the visual media of yesteryear, but have had trouble putting
their finger on it. In the 1990s, for example, there was much to do about the fact
that digital images lack an “original.” More recently, the proliferation of images
on social media and its implications for inter-subjectivity has been a topic of
much discussion among cultural theorists and critics. But these concerns still fail
to articulate exactly what’s at stake.
One problem is that these concerns still assume that humans are looking at
images, and that the relationship between human viewers and images is the most
important moment to analyze--but it’s exactly this assumption of a human
subject that I want to question.
What’s truly revolutionary about the advent of digital images is the fact that they
are fundamentally machine-readable: they can only be seen by humans in
special circumstances and for short periods of time. A photograph shot on a
phone creates a machine-readable file that does not reflect light in such a way as
to be perceptible to a human eye. A secondary application, like a software-based
photo viewer paired with a liquid crystal display and backlight may create
something that a human can look at, but the image only appears to human eyes
temporarily before reverting back to its immaterial machine form when the
phone is put away or the display is turned off. However, the image doesn’t need
to be turned into human-readable form in order for a machine to do something
with it. This is fundamentally different than a roll of undeveloped film. Although
film, too, must be coaxed by a chemical process into a form visible by human
eyes, the undeveloped film negative isn’t readable by a human or machine.
The fact that digital images are fundamentally machine-readable regardless of a

human subject has enormous implications. It allows for the automation of vision
on an enormous scale and, along with it, the exercise of power on dramatically
larger and smaller scales than have ever been possible.
Lake Tenaya
Maximally Stable External
Regions; Hough Transform
2016
II.
Our built environments are filled with examples of machine-to-machine seeing

apparatuses: Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) mounted on police cars,
buildings, bridges, highways, and fleets of private vehicles snap photos of every
car entering their frames. ALPR operators like the company Vigilant Solutions
collect the locations of every car their cameras see, use Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) to store license plate numbers, and create databases used by
police, insurance companies, and the like.[footnote: James Bridle’s “How Britain
Exported Next-Generation Surveillance” is an excellent introduction to APLR.]
In the consumer sphere, outfits like Euclid Analytics and Real Eyes, among many
others, install cameras in malls and department stores to track the motion of
people through these spaces with software designed to identify who is looking at
what for how long, and to track facial expressions to discern the mood and
emotional state of the humans they’re observing. Advertisements, too, have
begun to watch and record people. And in the industrial sector, companies like
Microscan provide full-fledged imaging systems designed to flag defects in

workmanship or materials, and to oversee packaging, shipping, logistics, and
transportation for automotive, pharmaceutical, electronics, and packaging
industries. All of these systems are only possible because digital images are
machine-readable and do not require a human in the analytic loop.
This invisible visual culture isn’t just confined to industrial operations, law
enforcement, and “smart” cities, but extends far into what we’d otherwise--and
somewhat naively--think of as human-to-human visual culture. I’m referring
here to the trillions of images that humans share on digital platforms--ones that
at first glance seem to be made by humans for other humans.
On its surface, a platform like Facebook seems analogous to the musty glue-
bound photo albums of postwar America. We “share” pictures on the Internet
and see how many people “like” them and redistribute them. In the old days,
people carried around pictures of their children in wallets and purses, showed
them to friends and acquaintances, and set up slideshows of family vacations.
What could be more human than a desire to show off one’s children? Interfaces
designed for digital image-sharing largely parrot these forms, creating “albums”
for selfies, baby pictures, cats, and travel photos.
But the analogy is deeply misleading, because something completely different

happens when you share a picture on Facebook than when you bore your
neighbors with projected slide shows. When you put an image on Facebook or
other social media, you’re feeding an array of immensely powerful artificial
intelligence systems information about how to identify people and how to
recognize places and objects, habits and preferences, race, class, and gender
identifications, economic statuses, and much more.
Regardless of whether a human subject actually sees any of the 2 billion

photographs uploaded daily to Facebook-controlled platforms, the photographs
on social media are scrutinized by neural networks with a degree of attention
that would make even the most steadfast art historian blush. Facebook’s
“DeepFace” algorithm, developed in 2014 and deployed in 2015, produces three-
dimensional abstractions of individuals’ faces and uses a neural network that
achieves over 97 percent accuracy at identifying individuals-- a percentage
comparable to what a human can achieve, ignoring for a second that no human
can recall the faces of billions of people.
There are many others: Facebook’s “DeepMask” and Google’s TensorFlow

identify people, places, objects, locations, emotions, gestures, faces, genders,
economic statuses, relationships, and much more.
In aggregate, AI systems have appropriated human visual culture and
transformed it into a massive, flexible training set. The more images Facebook
and Google’s AI systems ingest, the more accurate they become, and the more
influence they have on everyday life. The trillions of images we’ve been trained
to treat as human-to-human culture are the foundation for increasingly
autonomous ways of seeing that bear little resemblance to the visual culture of
the past.
“Goldfish”
Linear Classifier, ImageNet
Dataset
2016
?“Fire Boat”
Synthetic High Activation,
ImageNet Dataset
2016
III.
If we take a peek into the internal workings of machine-vision systems, we find a

menagerie of abstractions that seem completely alien to human perception. The
machine-machine landscape is not one of representations so much as activations
and operations. It’s constituted by active, performative relations much more
than classically representational ones. But that isn’t to say that there isn’t a formal
underpinning to how computer vision systems work.
All computer vision systems produce mathematical abstractions from the images
they’re analyzing, and the qualities of those abstractions are guided by the kind
of metadata the algorithm is trying to read. Facial recognition, for instance,
typically involves any number of techniques, depending on the application, the
desired efficiency, and the available training sets. The Eigenface technique, to
take an older example, analyzes someone’s face and subtracts from that the
features it has in common with other faces, leaving a unique facial “fingerprint”
or facial “archetype.” To recognize a particular person, the algorithm looks for
the fingerprint of a given person’s face.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), popularly called “deep learning”

networks, are built out of dozens or even hundreds of internal software layers
that can pass information back and forth. The earliest layers of the software pick
apart a given image into component shapes, gradients, luminosities, and corners.
Those individual components are convolved into synthetic shapes. Deeper in the
CNN, the synthetic images are compared to other images the network has been
trained to recognize, activating software “neurons” when the network finds
similarities.
We might think of these synthetic activations and other “hallucinated” structures

inside convolutional neural networks as being analogous to the archetypes of
some sort of Jungian collective unconscious of artificial intelligence--a tempting,
although misleading, metaphor. Neural networks cannot invent their own
classes; they’re only able to relate images they ingest to images that they’ve been
trained on. And their training sets reveal the historical, geographical, racial, and
socio-economic positions of their trainers. Feed an image of Manet’s “Olympia”
painting to a CNN trained on the industry-standard “Imagenet” training set, and
the CNN is quite sure that it’s looking at a “burrito.” It goes without saying that
the “burrito” object class is fairly specific to a youngish person in the San
Francisco Bay Area, where the modern “mission style” burrito was invented.
Spend a little bit of time with neural networks, and you realize that anyone
holding something in their hand is likely to be identified as someone “holding a
cellphone,” or “holding a Wii controller.” On a more serious note, engineers at
Google decided to deactivate the “gorilla” class after it became clear that its
algorithms trained on predominantly white faces and tended to classify African

Americans as apes.
The point here is that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-
machine visual culture, we need to unlearn how to see like humans. We need to
learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints,
eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and the like. But it’s not
just as simple as learning a different vocabulary. Formal concepts contain
epistemological assumptions, which in turn have ethical consequences. The
theoretical concepts we use to analyze visual culture are profoundly misleading
when applied to the machinic landscape, producing distortions, vast blind spots,
and wild misinterpretations.
(Research Image)
“Disgust”
Custom Hito Steyerl Emotion
Training Set
VI.
There is a temptation to criticize algorithmic image operations on the basis that

they’re often “wrong”--that “Olympia” becomes a burrito, and that African
Americans are labelled as non-humans. These critiques are easy, but misguided.
They implicitly suggest that the problem is simply one of accuracy, to be solved
by better training data. Eradicate bias from the training data, the logic goes, and
algorithmic operations will be decidedly less racist than human-human
interactions. Program the algorithms to see everyone equally and the humans
they so lovingly oversee shall be equal. I am not convinced.
Ideology’s ultimate trick has always been to present itself as objective truth, to
present historical conditions as eternal, and to present political formations as
natural. Because image operations function on an invisible plane and are not
dependent on a human seeing-subject (and are therefore not as obviously
ideological as giant paintings of Napoleon) they are harder to recognize for what
they are: immensely powerful levers of social regulation that serve specific race
and class interests while presenting themselves as objective.
The invisible world of images isn’t simply an alternative taxonomy of visuality. It

is an active, cunning, exercise of power, one ideally suited to molecular police
and market operations--one designed to insert its tendrils into ever-smaller
slices of everyday life.
Take the case of Vigilant Solutions. In January 2016, Vigilant Solutions, the
company that boasts of having a database of billions of vehicle locations
captured by ALPR systems, signed contracts with a handful of local Texas
governments. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the deal went like this: Vigilant Solutions provided police with a
suite of ALPR systems for their police cars and access to Vigilant’s larger
database. In return, the local government provided Vigilant with records of
outstanding arrest warrants and overdue court fees. A list of “flagged” license
plates associated with outstanding fines are fed into mobile ALPR systems. When
a mobile ALPR system on a police car spots a flagged license plate, the cop pulls
the driver over and gives them two options: they can pay the outstanding fine on
the spot with a credit card (plus at 25 percent “service fee” that goes directly to
Vigilant), or they can be arrested. In addition to their 25 percent surcharge,
Vigilant keeps a record of every license plate reading that the local police take,
adding information to their massive databases in order to be capitalized in other
ways. The political operations here are clear. Municipalities are incentivized to
balance their budgets on the backs of their most vulnerable populations, to
transform their police into tax-collectors, and to effectively sell police
surveillance data to private companies. Despite the “objectivity” of the overall
system, it unambiguously serves powerful government and corporate interests at
the expense of vulnerable populations and civic life.
As governments seek out new sources of revenue in an era of downsizing, and as

capital searches out new domains of everyday life to bring into its sphere, the
ability to use automated imaging and sensing to extract wealth from smaller and
smaller slices of everyday life is irresistible. It’s easy to imagine, for example, an
AI algorithm on Facebook noticing an underage woman drinking beer in a
photograph from a party. That information is sent to the woman’s auto
insurance provider, who subscribes to a Facebook program designed to provide
this kind of data to credit agencies, health insurers, advertisers, tax officials, and
the police. Her auto insurance premium is adjusted accordingly. A second
algorithm combs through her past looking for similar misbehavior that the
parent company might profit from. In the classical world of human-human
visual culture, the photograph responsible for so much trouble would have been
consigned to a shoebox to collect dust and be forgotten. In the machine-machine
visual landscape the photograph never goes away. It becomes an active
participant in the modulations of her life, with long-term consequences.
Smaller and smaller moments of human life are being transformed into capital,
whether it’s the ability to automatically scan thousands of cars for outstanding
court fees, or a moment of recklessness captured from a photograph uploaded to
the Internet. Your health insurance will be modulated by the baby pictures your
parents uploaded of you without your consent. The level of police scrutiny you
receive will be guided by your “pattern of life” signature.
The relationship between images and power in the machine-machine landscape

is different than in the human visual landscape. The former comes from the
enactment of two seemingly paradoxical operations. The first move is the
individualization and differentiation of the people, places, and everyday lives of
the landscapes under its purview--it creates a specific metadata signature of
every single person based on race, class, the places they live, the products they
consume, their habits, interests, “likes,” friends, and so on. The second move is to
reify those categories, removing any ambiguities in their interpretation so that
individualized metadata profiles can be operationalized to collect municipal fees,
adjust insurance rates, conduct targeted advertising, prioritize police
surveillance, and so on. The overall effect is a society that amplifies diversity (or
rather a diversity of metadata signatures) but does so precisely because the
differentiations in metadata signatures create inroads for the capitalization and

policing of everyday life.
Machine-machine systems are extraordinary intimate instruments of power that

operate through an aesthetics and ideology of objectivity, but the categories they
employ are designed to reify the forms of power that those systems are set up to
serve. As such, the machine-machine landscape forms a kind of hyper-ideology
that is especially pernicious precisely because it makes claims to objectivity and
equality.
V. (Research Images)
Magritte, Rosler, Opie
Dense Captioning, Age,
Cultural producers have developed very good
Gender, Adult Content
tactics and strategies for making interventions into
Detection
human-human visual culture in order to challenge
inequality, racism, and injustice. Counter-
hegemonic visual strategies and tactics employed by artists and cultural
producers in the human-human sphere often capitalize on the ambiguity of
human-human visual culture to produce forms of counter-culture--to make
claims, to assert rights, and to expand the field of represented peoples and
positions in visual culture. Martha Rosler’s influential artwork “Semiotics of the
Kitchen,” for example, transformed the patriarchal image of the kitchen as a
representation of masculinist order into a kind of prison; Emory Douglas’s
images of African American resistance and solidarity created a visual landscape
of self-empowerment; Catherine Opie’s images of queerness developed an
alternate vocabulary of gender and power. All of these strategies, and many
more, rely on the fact that the relationship between meaning and representation
is elastic. But this idea of ambiguity, a cornerstone of semiotic theory from
Saussure through Derrida, simply ceases to exist on the plane of quantified
machine-machine seeing. There’s no obvious way to intervene in machine-
machine systems using visual strategies developed from human-human culture.
Faced with this impasse, some artists and cultural workers are attempting to
challenge machine vision systems by creating forms of seeing that are legible to
humans but illegible to machines. Artist Adam Harvey, in particular, has
developed makeup schemes to thwart facial recognition algorithms, clothing to
suppress heat signatures, and pockets designed to prevent cellphones from
continually broadcasting their location to sensors in the surrounding landscape.
Julian Oliver often takes the opposite tack, developing hyper-predatory
machines intended to show the extent to which we are surrounded by sensing
machines, and the kinds of intimate information they’re collecting all the time.
These are noteworthy projects that help humans learn about the existence of
ubiquitous sensing. But these tactics cannot be generalized.
In the long run, developing visual strategies to defeat machine vision algorithms
is a losing strategy. Entire branches of computer vision research are dedicated to
creating “adversarial” images designed to thwart automated recognition systems.
These adversarial images simply get incorporated into training sets used to teach
algorithms how to overcome them. What’s more, in order to truly hide from
machine vision systems, the tactics deployed today must be able to resist not
only algorithms deployed at present, but algorithms that will be deployed in the
future. To hide one’s face from Facebook, one would not only have to develop a
tactic to thwart the “DeepFace” algorithm of today, but also a facial recognition
system from the future.
An effective resistance to the totalizing police and market powers exercised

through machine vision won’t be mounted through ad hoc technology. In the
long run, there’s no technical “fix” for the exacerbation of the political and
economic inequalities that invisible visual culture is primed to encourage. To
mediate against the optimizations and predations of a machinic landscape, one
must create deliberate inefficiencies and spheres of life removed from market
and political predations--“safe houses” in the invisible digital sphere. It is in
inefficiency, experimentation, self-expression, and often law-breaking that

freedom and political self-representation can be found.
We no longer look at images--images look at us. They no longer simply

represent things, but actively intervene in everyday life. We must begin to
understand these changes if we are to challenge the exceptional forms of power
flowing through the invisible visual culture that we find ourselves enmeshed
within.
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5/8/24, 8:38 AM Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) – The New Inquiry

THE NEW INQUIRY

ESSAYS & REVIEWS

Invisible Images (Your Pictures

An audio version of this essay is available to subscribers,

history our visual culture has also been made of

The landscape of invisible images and machine vision is becoming evermore

The fact that digital images are fundamentally machine-readable regardless of a

Our built environments are filled with examples of machine-to-machine seeing

Microscan provide full-fledged imaging systems designed to flag defects in

But the analogy is deeply misleading, because something completely different

Regardless of whether a human subject actually sees any of the 2 billion

There are many others: Facebook’s “DeepMask” and Google’s TensorFlow

If we take a peek into the internal workings of machine-vision systems, we find a

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), popularly called “deep learning”

We might think of these synthetic activations and other “hallucinated” structures

algorithms trained on predominantly white faces and tended to classify African

There is a temptation to criticize algorithmic image operations on the basis that

The invisible world of images isn’t simply an alternative taxonomy of visuality. It

As governments seek out new sources of revenue in an era of downsizing, and as

The relationship between images and power in the machine-machine landscape

differentiations in metadata signatures create inroads for the capitalization and

Machine-machine systems are extraordinary intimate instruments of power that

An effective resistance to the totalizing police and market powers exercised

inefficiency, experimentation, self-expression, and often law-breaking that

We no longer look at images--images look at us. They no longer simply

SUBSCRIBE $2 PER MONTH

ENTER YOUR EMAIL

Your Email SIGN UP

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