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" It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am. "
Trevor Paglen
Future
Cynical
I Am
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" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Creating
Easy
" Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. "
Trevor Paglen
Culture
Storytelling
Music
" Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better. "
Trevor Paglen
Space
Anything
Better
" 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
" We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. "
Trevor Paglen
Use
Build
Technology
" 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
" 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
" I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism. "
Trevor Paglen
Capitalism
Think
Monster
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Thought
Stories
Religion
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Look
Doing
Vision
" Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. "
Trevor Paglen
Live
Architecture
Art
" In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas. "
Trevor Paglen
Religion
Always
Ideas
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Human
See
Will
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Words
Photography
" I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything. "
Trevor Paglen
Make
Everything
Feel
" In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing. "
Trevor Paglen
Literature
Hiding
Information
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
You
Reason
Think
" 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
" 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
" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "
Trevor Paglen
Night
Up
Sky
" Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime. "
Trevor Paglen
Art
Looking
Long
" 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
" To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic. "
Trevor Paglen
Doing
Feel
Me
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Something
Border
Seen
" Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do. "
Trevor Paglen
Else
Than
Understood