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" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Night
Beautiful
Sky
Related Quotes:
" 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
" I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society. "
Trevor Paglen
Art
Society
Relevant
" The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites. "
Trevor Paglen
Dragon
Consistent
Intelligence
" I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Me
Say
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets. "
Trevor Paglen
Day
Streets
Work
" 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
" 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
" I am not a journalist or an academic. "
Trevor Paglen
Am
Academic
I Am
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
World
Same
You
" 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
" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "
Trevor Paglen
Depth
Extreme
Field
" I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective. "
Trevor Paglen
Perspective
Vision
Think
" 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
Up
People
" Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. "
Trevor Paglen
Live
Architecture
Art
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. "
Trevor Paglen
Much
Aviation
Law
" I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons. "
Trevor Paglen
Up
You
Astronomy
" 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
" When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves? "
Trevor Paglen
Alien
Us
Something
" When you look at the number of satellites, what they're doing and what they represent, it is really a vision of trying to have the world in your clutches. "
Trevor Paglen
Look
Doing
Vision
" 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
" It's productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can't teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be. "
Trevor Paglen
Try
Teach
Imagine
" I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning - it's not a bug. "
Trevor Paglen
Example
Racism
Machine
" Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world's information goes through little tubes under the ocean. Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world. "
Trevor Paglen
Start
Ocean
World