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" I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance. "
Trevor Paglen
Surveillance
Want
Vocabulary
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" I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know. "
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" 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. "
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" The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites. "
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" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "
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" Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. "
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" 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. "
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" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "
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" We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail. "
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" It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am. "
Trevor Paglen
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" 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. "
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" The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing. "
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" For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites. "
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" Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. "
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" 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! "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "
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" Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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