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" 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. "

Trevor Paglen

History

You

Data

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

" 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

" 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. "

" People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

Trevor Paglen

Doing

Feel

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of 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. "

" 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 don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything. "

" I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Once, I got lost in the middle of the desert and had to follow the North Star to find the dirt road where my truck was parked a few miles away. Another time, I got stuck in quicksand for two days. "

" 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. "

" If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen. "

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

" 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. "

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

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