Trevor Paglen: From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ at the Barbican

In today, Multi- media information leads response in contemporary society as effective images. This review will focus on the display of the exhibition “The Curve”which shows dense materials because photos are from the ImageNet dataset were chose in order to perform object recognition. According to Barbican Press (2019) Trevor Paglen was commissioned to create “The Curve” (December 2019). His work refers to human behavior in history. He is interested in visualizing unseen power in humanity’s daily life. Trevor Paglen notes that ‘These images aren’t meant for us; they’re meant to do things in the world; human eyes aren’t in the loop. (2019)’ This has lead to a development of a visualization to imagine an alternative near future. In the Curve Gallery, images gather together to draw an eye of viewers so they collect stories out of the flow. Square 10cm x 10cm photos are scattered in ordered compositions over the curved wall. Shallow lights from the ceiling help the audience to look at the photos without distraction. There are name tags that are active as representatives such as (Venture capitalist), (Diverse lawyer) and (Pentagons) on the themes. Each words are attached with for groups of photos. Around the keywords, related photos gather together build up an atmosphere.


When I was in the exhibition, I was stopped from taking photos by the staff. I am linking that moment to many artist minding photos abused by third party. On the other hand, there is that or they liked the audience to be in present. So if the photos are linking people around the world. Madonna said there is restrictions from now on in my show to not take photos. She wanted audience to be present but not really the asthetic of third party.

There are attractive keywords that vary over the circular wall which involves from the nature of the sun, honeycomb and cheetahs to humanity such as politician, dentist and there is even a spy satelite. Together they produce a huge pool of informative web. From watching it visitors receive that wonderful feeling of mixture through cultures of the universe. The burning sun and spy satelite floating in space into the stars glowing are a storage symbol of technology. Although they are both not natural and not sorted as a same category in term of production by mankind it is even better the difference from each other. The difference between couple of pictures remind viewers of a storyboard coming out of them. After a while with an eye of observation, the visitors reach a realization that each theme of photos are not literally pointing out truth. For instance, a word from the wall “racist” is next to a picture of President Obama. It depicts that the data pool includes a target of racism to an obvious racist. Each group of photos are responsible for clear points that are concise and dense. On the other hand, there are simply dramatic group of photos such as alcoholics and infections which affect the viewers with a creepy feeling. Several keywords not considered normal but extraordinary and also included are the words: (hunks) and (drugs). As a result, the efficacy of photos build up dynamic stories using only several words. Therefore, “The Curve” illustrates audience imagination of stories refering to the presentation.

The flow of photos ends up with reminder of a huge storyboard. They are ordered in decent color ranges with natural or extraordinary pictures with thoughtful lists of words. It is quite impressive when the viewers construct stories in their head by observing them as water flow. Most of the pictures have connections between their objects in “The Curve” which is a language shared each other as a nature, people and science and society. In that way, “the Curve” causes the audience to feel involved by themselves. This idea is a huge inspiration to give people a space of imagination through their ongoing project.


Bibliography

Barbican (2019) Press room Trevor Pagan: From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’. Available at: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/trevor-paglen-from-apple-to-anomaly (Accessed: 21 January 2020).

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