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" 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. "

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" Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see. "

Trevor Paglen

Attention

World

Words

" I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance. "

" 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. "

" In the late 19th century, Russian Cosmists such as Nikolai Fyodorov believed we need to go to space to collect all the particles of all the people who had ever lived. Cosmism says going into space is going into the past. "

Trevor Paglen

Late

Need

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

Trevor Paglen

Artist

Changes

" 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. "

" We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. "

" Traditionally, images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines, and no human being will ever see them. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Oftentimes, secrecy involves creating spaces that are outside of the law but are outside the normal channels of oversight. And I think it's pretty easy to see that if you create spaces that are essentially outside the law, then you're creating spaces where anything can happen. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Creative projects are rarely the result of a single person's efforts. "

" Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime. "

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

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

" 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