Backslash Fellow Talk – Trevor Paglen + Media Commons Launch
About this Event
Join Backslash for an evening of art and conversation as we celebrate the launch of the Media Commons at Cornell Tech. The evening features an artist talk and Q&A with Trevor Paglen, the 2026–27 Backslash Fellow, a $50,000 USD fellowship that supports an established practicing artist to create a significant new work of art that engages bleeding-edge digital research and technology. The event will be followed by a brief overview of Backslash’s grants and artist application process, and a celebration of the launch of Cornell Tech’s new Media Commons, a space for artistic prototyping, performance, and exhibition. Reception to follow.
Backslash is located on the 2nd floor of the Tata Innovation Center, on the Cornell Tech campus 11 East Loop Road, Roosevelt Island).
ABOUT BACKSLASH and THE MEDIA COMMONS:
is Cornell’s initiative for art and tech that escapes convention. It pairs students and faculty with artists, facilitating deep collaborations with cutting-edge technology to create lasting impact on artists’ practices.
The Media Commons is Cornell Tech's new space for creative, public-facing work. Shared between Backslash and the Lab of Game Assemblies, the Media Commons serves as the campus' hub for artistic prototyping, performance, and exhibitions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Fondazione Prada, the Barbican Centre, Vienna Secession, and Protocinema Istanbul, and has been included in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, Tate Modern, and numerous other venues.
He has launched an artwork into 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. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. He received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award in 2014, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2016, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
In March 2026, Paglen was named the winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. His sixth book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, was released by Verso Books 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.
Introduction by , Faculty Director of Backslash. He is an Associate Professor and Co-director of M.S. Design Tech, a multi-college program at Cornell AAP and Cornell Tech.
Free and open to the public. Registration required (one registration per attendee; duplicates will be deleted).
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IMAGE CAPTIONS:
From Glacier Point (Haar; Skeletonize; Maximally Stable Extremal Regions; Custom Classifier, Deep Semantic Image Segments; Watershed, 2026); Near Hollow Road (undated); CLOUD #557 (Hough Line Transform; Hough Circle Transform, 2023). Courtesy the artist.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
