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" It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. "
Trevor Paglen
Common
Turned
Knowledge
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Work
Misunderstanding
People
" In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little. "
Trevor Paglen
Power
Government
Democracy
" '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. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
World
Create
" If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
Look
Vast
" 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
" 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
Up
People
" American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
I Am
Legal
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Sun
Red
Now
" Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. "
Trevor Paglen
Much
Aviation
Law
" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "
Trevor Paglen
Night
Up
Sky
" 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
Us
Secret
See
" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "
Trevor Paglen
Internet
Business
Surveillance
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Political
Time
" 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
Up
You
Astronomy
" We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. "
Trevor Paglen
Use
Build
Technology
" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "
Trevor Paglen
Hard
Launch
Been
" Engineers working in the 'black world' of classified military projects are often referred to in military circles as 'black hats.' There are a lot of jokes about the difference between 'white hats' and their spooky counterparts. "
Trevor Paglen
Spooky
World
Black
" 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
" Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. "
Trevor Paglen
Our
Logic
Nation
" Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better. "
Trevor Paglen
Space
Anything
Better
" I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know. "
Trevor Paglen
Politics
Think
Work
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Body
Learn
Knowledge
" In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas. "
Trevor Paglen
Religion
Always
Ideas
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
Trail
Paper
" Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it. "
Trevor Paglen
World
Social
Isolation
" Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Photography
See
" Injustice drives me crazy! "
Trevor Paglen
Crazy
Me
Injustice
" I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky. "
Trevor Paglen
Night
Beautiful
Sky
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
World
Same
You
" I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism. "
Trevor Paglen
Capitalism
Think
Monster