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" Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do. "
Trevor Paglen
Else
Than
Understood
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" Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible. "
Trevor Paglen
Invisible
Things
Way
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Sky
Because
Military
" We imagine going to the moon and planting a flag, going to an asteroid and mining, going to Mars and setting up a colony. And I think that expansionist mentality is very self-destructive, especially given the kind of precarious relationship we now have to the ecosystem here on Earth, because it allows us to imagine that Earth is disposable. "
Trevor Paglen
Flag
Think
Relationship
" I have to admit that I'm not very good with grammar. They taught grammar in elementary and high school, but I went to public schools, so I never really learned it. "
Trevor Paglen
Never
School
High School
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
World
Start
Say
" The U.S. space program has mythologies attached to pioneering and conquering, but the Russian tradition is very different. In the Russian tradition, the ultimate goal of humanity was to resurrect all humans. "
Trevor Paglen
Tradition
Goal
Space
" Religions have always adopted rich symbolic languages to signify the different aspects of their respective forms of faith and mythology. "
Trevor Paglen
Religions
Adopted
Always
" Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it. "
Trevor Paglen
World
Social
Isolation
" The most famous secret base, I guess, would be Area 51, which a lot of people have heard of as a kind of mythical place. Well, it's a real place. "
Trevor Paglen
Place
Well
Real
" Traditionally, images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines, and no human being will ever see them. "
Trevor Paglen
Human
See
Will
" If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
Look
Vast
" In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little. "
Trevor Paglen
Power
Government
Democracy
" On one hand, the idea of sending pictures off into the vastness of space and time seems nonsensical. On the other, I felt like the gesture carried an enormous amount of responsibility. "
Trevor Paglen
Pictures
Responsibility
Space
" I think that a lot of us subconsciously would like to live in a world in which good things were beautiful and bad things were ugly. But that's not how the world works. "
Trevor Paglen
Good
Live
Bad
" It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. "
Trevor Paglen
Common
Turned
Knowledge
" Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Photography
See
" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "
Trevor Paglen
Depth
Extreme
Field
" In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas. "
Trevor Paglen
Religion
Always
Ideas
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
People
Buildings
" I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to. "
Trevor Paglen
Pretty
Conscious
Lot
" The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992. "
Trevor Paglen
Like
Old
Existence
" Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say. "
Trevor Paglen
Hide
Society
Me
" What started happening really quickly after 9/11 and the construction of this 'War on Terror' business is that I saw all kinds of parallels between the way that was being constructed and the way that prisons had been constructed since the early 1980s. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Business
Construction
" The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now. "
Trevor Paglen
Sun
Red
Now
" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "
Trevor Paglen
Night
Up
Sky
" Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime. "
Trevor Paglen
Art
Looking
Long
" I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective. "
Trevor Paglen
Perspective
Vision
Think
" The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing. "
Trevor Paglen
Feel
World
Job
" Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see. "
Trevor Paglen
Attention
World
Words
" For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites. "
Trevor Paglen
Stars
Romantic
Me