Shownotes
The companion podcast to Issue No.87 of The Intersect. Chelsea and Georgia sit with a question that has been quietly reshaping how we look at everything: when did images stop showing us the world and start acting on it? Twenty-five years after the emergency began, they trace the shift from picture as window to picture as lever, and ask what we are still looking at.
Contents
- 00:10 Opening 9/11 Memory
- 02:25 Images as Instruments
- 03:56 Paglin and Machine Vision
- 06:17 9/11 and Broken Trust
- 09:21 Refugees Train the Machines
- 12:20 The Targeting Blimp
- 15:37 Carpet as Witness
In this episode
Seeing like a machine Trevor Paglen makes a claim Chelsea can barely wrap her head around: this shift matters more than the invention of photography itself. What does it mean when an image is no longer a window but something someone else is pulling on you?
The moment trust broke Weapons that were not there, footage sold as surgical precision, pictures used for what they did not show. Georgia and Chelsea follow the drift back to a single anniversary, and the feeling that started that day.
The people who taught the machine to see Three refugees in a camp, tagging thousands of images, building the very tools that would later flag people like them. It is a loop so unsettling it took a prize-winning installation to name it.
Would you stand under the blimp? A helium dirigible reads your posture and sorts you into a category: enemy or civilian. The surveillance gets turned back on the people who usually do the watching, and you become the subject.
A carpet that becomes history A painter who refuses preparatory drawings turns a threadbare office carpet into a question about certainty itself. What do we lose when the machine connects every dot for us?
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