Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world. "

Trevor Paglen

World

Knowledge

Internet

" I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know. "

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

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

" I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored. "

" My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas. "

" 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

You

Astronomy

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. "

" Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over. "

" 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. "

" When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves? "

Trevor Paglen

Alien

Something

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

" 'The Last Pictures' is meant to create a framework to think about the long-term effects of human civilizations and the transformations we've made to the world around us. Having said that, every person in the world would have done the project differently, so in that sense, I guess it bears my creative stamp. "

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

Trevor Paglen

Artist

Changes

" 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

" Injustice drives me crazy! "

Trevor Paglen

Crazy

Injustice

" 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

Old

Existence

" It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism. "

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