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" Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible. "
Trevor Paglen
Invisible
Things
Way
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" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. "
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Music
" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "
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Night
Up
Sky
" I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance. "
Trevor Paglen
Surveillance
Want
Vocabulary
" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "
Trevor Paglen
Depth
Extreme
Field
" 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
" I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to. "
Trevor Paglen
Pretty
Conscious
Lot
" 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
" I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Me
Say
" 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
" 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? "
Trevor Paglen
Sky
World
Ocean
" Creative projects are rarely the result of a single person's efforts. "
Trevor Paglen
Person
Result
Rarely
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Try
Teach
Imagine
" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "
Trevor Paglen
Internet
Business
Surveillance
" 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
" Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world's information goes through little tubes under the ocean. Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world. "
Trevor Paglen
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Ocean
World
" When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves? "
Trevor Paglen
Alien
Us
Something
" My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah. "
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People
Military
Dad
" For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place. "
Trevor Paglen
Artist
Changes
Me
" Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter. "
Trevor Paglen
Struggles
Matter
Reality
" The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992. "
Trevor Paglen
Like
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Existence
" 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. "
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Pictures
Responsibility
Space
" Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say. "
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Hide
Society
Me
" 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. "
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See
Will
" Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it. "
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World
Social
Isolation
" I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society. "
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Art
Society
Relevant
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Flag
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Relationship