CHAPTER VIII
Hallucinations
Curated by
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Troika
Trevor Paglen
UPCOMING
5/2/2026
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31/5/2026
Hallucinations brings together two distinct, yet convergent, artistic practices that examine how technologies shape perception, legibility, and the construction of reality. While Trevor Paglen unveils the invisible infrastructures that sustain contemporary vision, Troika investigates the systems we create to make the world appear more ordered and coherent than it truly is.
In dialogue, their works question where perception ends and technological design begins, inviting viewers to sense the world anew—as a living network of reflections and correspondences, where every gaze, signal, and root mirrors another form of being.
Chapter VIII: Hallucinations brings together the distinct yet convergent practices of artist Trevor Paglen and the collective Troika, interrogating how technologies shape perception, legibility, and the construction of reality. Both Paglen and Troika examine how technology configures the ways we see
and understand the world, though they approach this question from opposite directions: Paglen reveals infrastructures designed to remain invisible, while Troika investigates systems created to make the world appear more ordered and coherent than it truly is. In dialogue, their works open a
space to question where perception ends and where technological design begins.
Across four galleries, Hallucinations traces a shared fascination with the ways humans, machines, and environments perceive, transform, and “dream” one another. The exhibition moves between data-driven vision systems, forests interwoven with electronics, and installations that evoke vegetal
intelligences, placing technological, natural, and perceptual structures into conversation. Paglen and Troika illuminate hidden architectures—algorithmic, biological, historical, and imagined—that organize the world we inhabit, often without our awareness. Their works chart shifting
forms of life and perception, revealing how the organic and the artificial continually influence and reshape one another.
In Anima Atman, Troika experiments with the premise that plants possess their own intelligence and consciousness. A group of thistles sprouts from a landscape of gleaming silicon rocks, moving almost imperceptibly, as if animated by a supernatural energy. This ambiguous vitality, situated between the
real and the imagined, turns the installation into a threshold where the familiar becomes strange. In Irma Watched Over by Machines, the impassive gaze of a camera documents the destruction caused by Hurricane Irma in 2017, confronting the natural force of catastrophe with the indifferent logic of the
machine. Together, these works raise questions about non-human sensitivity, causality, and the act of
observation.
In dialogue, Trevor Paglen’s works amplify these tensions by tracing the political, material, and perceptual infrastructures that allow humans and machines to learn how to see. In Faces of ImageNet, Paglen makes visible the real harms that machine-learning systems can perpetuate. In Bloom, he presents a field of algorithmically generated flowers—images created not from observation, but through artificial vision systems trained to recognize and distort botanical forms—while in Clouds, he transforms the sky into a surveilled territory, where even clouds are classified through the languages of computational control.
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