TREVOR PAGLEN

Trevor Paglen, De Beauvoir (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) Eigenface, 2017.  © TREVOR PAGLEN.COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

There is an image of Simone de Beauvoir on my mind. It’s a composite photograph, created by blending images identified as her by facial recognition programs. The result is an AI-generated portrait: a machine’s interpretation of identity. It’s surreal, yet strangely vivid—a young version of de Beauvoir—but I remind myself that it is a photograph never actually taken, she never posed for this and yet it now exists in the world. Its subtitle, Even the Dead Are Not Safe, feels truer than ever.

I think about this non-image as you walk through a darkened room filled with sculpted heads—disembodied forms that evoke the sensation of the dead still living among us. Like Whitney Houston on Instagram, where I see endless reels of her tragically destroying herself with drugs. Even Princess Diana is alive there, smiling conspicuously. It feels as though the dead will return to haunt us, and some should, for we didn’t do enough to protect them.

I passed Beauvoir’s grave the other day, on my way to see the house of Agnès Varda, who’s also gone. I wonder what they might make of us now. Of where we are. Of what we do. I wish I could turn back time so that the women who call themselves feminists hadn't made that ridiculous trip into space—crammed into a tiny craft, too aware of every camera. Watching them, it was as if they didn’t exist. That they weren’t really there, only creating images of themselves rather than actually living, reducing themselves to constructed, non-existent selfies.