Trevor Paglen, the current LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative Award Recipient, is giving a performance-lecture according to a May 8, 2026 Guggenheim Museum announcement (received via email and available online here),
Trevor Paglen: The Lizard People are Here!
Monday, May 18, 2026
6:30–8 pm EDT
Guggenheim New YorkThis performance-lecture invites audiences to consider whether we are entering a new era of invisible architectures and algorithmic systems shaping perception, knowledge, and power. In the program, 2026 LG Guggenheim Award recipient, artist, and author Trevor Paglen traces a dense network of ideas spanning philosophy, belief, deception, and speculation.
Bringing together psyops, artificial intelligence, magic, mind control, UFOs, the secret of the Ark of the Covenant, and the figure of a new demiurge, Paglen examines historical precedents for the manipulation of human perception and cognition at a moment when artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly pervasive.
Across his practice, Paglen has repeatedly revealed the infrastructures through which information systems—governmental, corporate, and algorithmic—operate beyond the threshold of human perception while profoundly reshaping how reality is understood. Drawing on figures and practices from diverse domains, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency to stage magicians and contemporary technologists, the talk uncovers recurring strategies of influence and control. In doing so, it raises timely questions about why supposedly rational minds remain vulnerable to structures of influence that bypass conscious reasoning and instead engage our most instinctive psychological responses.
The program will be followed by a conversation between Paglen and Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator, reflecting on how rapid developments in artificial intelligence—from large language models to agentic and robotic systems—are reshaping everyday life, modes of thought, and artistic practice.
For those who don’t know, LG Electronics is a South Korean multinational electronics company. and for anyone needing a little more information about Trevor Paglen, there’s this from his Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work covers mass surveillance and data collection.[1][2]
In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize[3] and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography.[4] In 2017, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. On March 17, 2026, Paglen was awarded the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award (a collaboration between LG and Guggenheim New York).[5][6]
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Work
Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2015, said that Paglen, whose “ongoing grand project [is] the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare”, “is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects.”[2] His visual work such as his “Limit Telephotography”[9] and “The Other Night Sky” series have received widespread attention for both his technical innovations and for his conceptual project that involves simultaneously making and negating documentary-style truth-claims.[10] Paglen’s work relies on contemporary technology in two meaningful ways. Firstly, the views he photographs would be impossible to shoot without media tech, that includes the cameras, the microscopes, and even helicopters.[11] But interestingly enough, the shots would not be possible if not for the existence of the subject. The contrasts between secrecy and revelation, evidence and abstraction distinguish Paglen’s work. With that the artist presents not so much “evidence” as admonitions to awareness.[12][13]
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On balance, I found the Guggenheim’s description of Paglen’s work a little more accessible than the one in his Wikipedia entry. There’s also Paglen’s own website; from his bio page,
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines.
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Another accessible description but more clicking (you’ll see when you get to his homepage).
