A Prestigious Honor for a Visionary Artist

The Guggenheim Museum has named Trevor Paglen as the recipient of the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award, one of the most prestigious recognitions in the intersection of art and technology. The announcement marks a milestone for an artist who has spent decades making the invisible visible.

Why Trevor Paglen

Paglen is not a conventional visual artist. Working at the crossroads of art, geography, and technology criticism, he has built a singular body of work that exposes the hidden infrastructures of power—surveillance networks, military installations, undersea data cables, and AI training datasets.

His practice has consistently challenged the notion that technology is neutral, revealing how AI systems can encode bias and perpetuate inequality. According to reports from the art world, the Guggenheim cited his work as "one of the most acute artistic investigations into humanity's relationship with technological infrastructure."

Two Decades Photographing the Unseen

Paglen first drew widespread attention in the mid-2000s with long-range photographs of classified NSA facilities and secret military bases. Shot from extreme distances with telephoto lenses, these images visualized spaces that officially did not exist.

After Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations, his work gained sharper social resonance. He went on to photograph surveillance satellites in Earth's orbit using long exposures, and analyzed the millions of images that train AI facial recognition systems.

In 2019, his project 'ImageNet Roulette' sparked international debate by exposing how AI classification systems distort perceptions of race and gender—ultimately leading to the removal of portions of the dataset in question.

Art as a Mirror to Power

Paglen's work asks a deceptively simple question: are we seeing the world more clearly through technology, or are we seeing a distorted world through the eyes technology has built for us?

The physical infrastructure of the digital age—server farms, data centers, fiber-optic cables—remains largely invisible to the public. Paglen argues, through his art, that this invisibility is itself a mechanism of power.

The LG Guggenheim Award will help bring his explorations to a broader audience, with the museum planning exhibitions and programs tied to the recognition.