“Imagine a war of autonomous machines.”

Four key words, freighted on their own, fearsome in combination: Imagine. War. Autonomous. Machines. The sentence is quoted from a documentary film by the late Harun Farocki. It is the obsessive central topic of a tribute by Trevor Paglen, published last year. It is, Paglen writes, one of “two critical warnings about a future that has already come to pass … an observation about the relationship between seeing and contemporary warfare.”

Paglen has made a career of art about what he calls the “unseeable and undocumentable.” His work points obliquely to what can’t be observed straight on. That often includes potent but highly secret weapons of surveillance and battle — photographs of barely discernible military satellites and drones, lost in a vast sky; images of closely guarded installations, recorded through high-power telescopes; endlessly scrolling lists of operation code names.

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Paglen comes to Stanford with the goal of working with faculty, researchers and students not only in the fine arts, but in disciplines not so closely associated with the Cantor Center. The work of two scholars, in particular, attracted him. Jennifer Granick is a lawyer and the director of civil liberties for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School; Fei-Fei Li is director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab.

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