“YOU’VE JUST BEEN *$%^#* BY PSYOPS: UFOS, MAGIC, ELECTRONIC WARFARE, MIND CONTROL, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE DEATH OF THE INTERNET”

As AI-generated content, social media influence operations, microtargeted advertising and ubiquitous surveillance have become the norm on the internet and in the market in general, we have entered an era of PSYOP capitalism. This is an era of generated hallucinations and manipulations designed to transform each of us into a “targeted individual” through the manipulation of perception. This talk explores a history of secret military and intelligence programs that serve as antecedents to a phantasmagoric present.

Biography
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering and numerous other disciplines. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema, Istanbul. His work has been in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and numerous other venues. Paglen 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 is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography and visuality. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Artforum and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award; in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.