Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Paglen’s work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. Paglen is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017. In March 2026, Paglen was named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. Paglen’s sixth book, “How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI“, was released by Verso Books in the same year. Paglen holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley.

Xin Wang is a New York-based art historian and curator. She held curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, and wrote her PhD dissertation on Soviet Hauntology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She served as the chief curator of the 4th art and technology themed biennial program—titled “To Your Eternity”—at Beijing’s Today Art Museum in fall 2023, and is Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery. A Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant recipient, she has published widely; essays such as “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” have been widely circulated, translated, and taught. Recent publications include “Machine Envy” in the book Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic and NYU Shanghai), and “Dance as Socialist World-Building” in Afterall Journal (issue 57).