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" I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level. "

Trevor Paglen

Work

Vision

Thought

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

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

Trevor Paglen

Stars

Romantic

" Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. "

" Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them. "

Trevor Paglen

Cave

Mean

" 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. "

" 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

" '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. "

" One of the kinds of things I'm consistently interested in is what the border between the seen and not seen is and the border between being able to perceive something and not perceive it. "

" 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

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

" I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning - it's not a bug. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to. "

" To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic. "

Trevor Paglen

Doing

Feel

" If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. "

" I am not a journalist or an academic. "

Trevor Paglen

Academic

I Am

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there's got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases. "

" 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! "

" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "

Trevor Paglen

Night

Sky

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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