Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017–ongoing) treats machine hallucination not as a glitch but as the defining condition of AI-made images—and this slim critical reader, volume four in Sternberg Press’s Research/Practice series, unpacks what that means.
Edited by Anthony Downey, the book pairs a conversation between Paglen and Downey with Downey’s essay “The Return of the Uncanny: Artificial Intelligence and Estranged Futures.” Paglen describes training neural networks on invented corpora, then prompting a second network to hallucinate images from what it has learned to “see,” yielding uncanny prints like Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism). Downey argues AI’s lack of embodied experience means it can only produce estranged, allegorical pictures of the world.
Paglen (b. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland) is an American artist and geographer whose work exposes the infrastructures of state secrecy, surveillance, and machine vision. A 2017 MacArthur Fellow, he has shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Barbican, with work held by MoMA and the Whitney. The volume extends an inquiry into AI classification running from ImageNet Roulette (2019, with Kate Crawford) to his 2026 book How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI.
Notes
No LOC or WorldCat catalog record found for this ISBN as of research date (queried lx2.loc.gov SRU and loc.gov/search JSON API — zero results) this is common for small-press art-theory paperbacks shortly after release. loc_data.subject_headings above are editorially constructed (not LOC-sourced) to approximate authoritative LOC vocabulary and are flagged accordingly — do not treat as a verified LC record. Page count corroborated at 160pp by three independent primary/near-primary sources (Sternberg Press direct product page, AbeBooks, Tique library listing) one outlier (ideabooks.nl, 168pp) and one outlier (BCU pureportal, 172pp) not used. Dimensions 11×18cm corroborated by Sternberg direct + AbeBooks (converted from 4.25×7in) + Tique. Cover image confirmed by direct visual read: grey/light background, blue text, 'Research/Practice 04 / Trevor Paglen / Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations / Edited by Anthony Downey', greyscale bust image, Sternberg Press colophon — matches Amazon listing description. classification/collection_grouping follow the closest existing Hudson Street precedent for AI/digital-culture themed art books (id 465, Wade Guyton — 'Art' / 'Art Contemporary Art Digital Culture') id 1812 ('(Inter)Faces of Predictions', Spector Books) is a close thematic sibling under 'Photography, Technology' / 'Photography Technology Studies' if a librarian prefers that pairing instead. Subjects (LOC): Paglen, Trevor, 1974- -- Criticism and interpretation Artificial intelligence -- Social aspects Computer vision Neural networks (Computer science) -- Social aspects Photography -- Philosophy Digital art -- Themes, motives. Summer acquisitions and archiving 2026. Accessioned 2026-07-24.
