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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "

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

Trevor Paglen

Stars

Romantic

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

" 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. "

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

" The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites. "

" Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter. "

" Once, I got lost in the middle of the desert and had to follow the North Star to find the dirt road where my truck was parked a few miles away. Another time, I got stuck in quicksand for two days. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When people understand that they are constantly monitored, they are more conformist - they are less willing to take up controversial positions - and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy. "

Trevor Paglen

Democracy

People

" It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. "

" Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing. "

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

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

" 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. "

" In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" In the late 19th century, Russian Cosmists such as Nikolai Fyodorov believed we need to go to space to collect all the particles of all the people who had ever lived. Cosmism says going into space is going into the past. "

Trevor Paglen

Late

Need

" People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like. "

" 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. "

" 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. "