Trevor Paglen: The Lizard People Are Here!
Artist Trevor Paglen delivers a performance-lecture at the Guggenheim tracing conspiracies, AI, psyops, and the manipulation of human perception from the CIA to tech platforms.
Why we picked this
Paglen has spent years photographing secret military bases, undersea data cables, and NSA-linked satellite constellations. When he asks why rational minds are vulnerable to algorithmic manipulation, he's asking from inside the infrastructure itself.
Trevor Paglen — artist, author, geographer, and 2026 LG Guggenheim Award recipient — delivers a performance-lecture that cuts across philosophy, conspiracy theory, artificial intelligence, and the history of perception manipulation. The talk traces a dense network: psyops, mind control research, UFO culture, stage magic, the Ark of the Covenant, and the emergence of a new algorithmic demiurge. The thread connecting them is the recurring human vulnerability to systems of influence that bypass conscious reasoning.
Paglen’s work has long operated at the edges of what can be seen and known. He has photographed classified military satellites, documented the topography of NSA surveillance infrastructure, and revealed the training datasets embedded in facial recognition systems. This lecture extends that inquiry into the contemporary moment — asking how AI systems that operate beyond the threshold of human perception are reshaping how reality itself is understood.
The program follows a conversation between Paglen and Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator, on how large language models, agentic AI, and robotic systems are changing everyday life and artistic practice. The $25 ticket price reflects the Guggenheim’s programming costs; this is genuinely one of the more ambitious intellectual events scheduled for the spring.