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" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "
Trevor Paglen
Depth
Extreme
Field
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" Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do. "
Trevor Paglen
Else
Than
Understood
" 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
" Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them. "
Trevor Paglen
Am
Cave
Mean
" Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading. "
Trevor Paglen
Cloud
Internet
Skies
" We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. "
Trevor Paglen
Use
Build
Technology
" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "
Trevor Paglen
Internet
Business
Surveillance
" Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible. "
Trevor Paglen
Invisible
Things
Way
" 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
" We humans have always looked to the sky as a sounding board for asking big questions about ourselves: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? "
Trevor Paglen
Going
Always
Big
" What I thought was fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they're going, and what it means to be alive on the planet. "
Trevor Paglen
Thought
Stories
Religion
" Oftentimes, secrecy involves creating spaces that are outside of the law but are outside the normal channels of oversight. And I think it's pretty easy to see that if you create spaces that are essentially outside the law, then you're creating spaces where anything can happen. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Creating
Easy
" I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know. "
Trevor Paglen
Politics
Think
Work
" Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. "
Trevor Paglen
Our
Logic
Nation
" Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition. "
Trevor Paglen
Us
Looking
World
" Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better. "
Trevor Paglen
Space
Anything
Better
" What I'm trying to do is to get a glimpse into the secret state that surrounds us all the time but that we have not trained ourselves to see very well. "
Trevor Paglen
Us
Secret
See
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
I Am
Legal
" I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Good
Eyes
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Body
Learn
Knowledge
" I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism. "
Trevor Paglen
Capitalism
Think
Monster
" For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented. "
Trevor Paglen
Question
Artists
Cannot
" In human geography, we think about landscapes as being political, social, cultural, economic, and physical things all at the same time. And that's the way that I wanted to approach the question of state secrecy. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Political
Time
" To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic. "
Trevor Paglen
Doing
Feel
Me
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Spooky
World
Black
" 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 think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective. "
Trevor Paglen
Perspective
Vision
Think
" I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored. "
Trevor Paglen
Understand
Society
People
" In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race! "
Trevor Paglen
Social Media
Future
Health
" In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas. "
Trevor Paglen
Religion
Always
Ideas
" 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