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All Quotes by author - Trevor Paglen

" Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. "

" American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work. "

" Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better. "

" Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. "

" Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do. "

" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "

" Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge. "

" Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. "

" Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy. "

" Creative projects are rarely the result of a single person's efforts. "

" Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them. "

" Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them. "

" Engineers working in the 'black world' of classified military projects are often referred to in military circles as 'black hats.' There are a lot of jokes about the difference between 'white hats' and their spooky counterparts. "

" Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object. "

" For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place. "

" For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites. "

" For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented. "

" Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more. "

" How has the sky been transformed by drones? How has the ocean been transformed by the fact that over 90% of the world's information travels in underwater cables? "

" I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise. "

" I am not a journalist or an academic. "

" I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society. "

" I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky. "

" I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything. "

" I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets. "

" If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there's got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases. "

" If secrecy is made out of the same stuff that the rest of the world is made out of, then it's fundamentally visible, which means that secrecy can only fail in the first instance, in the sense that you cannot make something disappear. "

" If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure. "

" If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. "

" If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen. "

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