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" 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. "

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" 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

Start

Ocean

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. "

" 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. "

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

Trevor Paglen

Artist

Changes

" 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. "

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

" For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites. "

Trevor Paglen

Stars

Romantic

" 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! "

" The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing. "

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

" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "

" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "

Trevor Paglen

Night

Sky

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter. "

" I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society. "

" When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves? "

Trevor Paglen

Alien

Something

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

Trevor Paglen

Doing

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. "

" 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

Old

Existence

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

" Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more. "

Trevor Paglen

Will

Civilization

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

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

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

" 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. "

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