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" 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. "

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" I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise. "

Trevor Paglen

World

Start

Say

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

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

" 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. "

" Religions have always adopted rich symbolic languages to signify the different aspects of their respective forms of faith and mythology. "

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

" One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition. "

Trevor Paglen

Looking

World

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" How has the sky been transformed by drones? How has the ocean been transformed by the fact that over 90% of the world's information travels in underwater cables? "

" I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something. "

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

" What I'm trying to do is to get a glimpse into the secret state that surrounds us all the time but that we have not trained ourselves to see very well. "

Trevor Paglen

Secret

See

" It was a very strange time in the late 1950s/early 1960s, when people were putting things in space, but that language of spacecraft hadn't really congealed yet. A lot of artists at that time were looking at them as aesthetic objects. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

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

Trevor Paglen

Night

Sky

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

" Injustice drives me crazy! "

Trevor Paglen

Crazy

Injustice

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