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" 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
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" 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! "
Trevor Paglen
Social Media
Future
Health
" 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
" My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah. "
Trevor Paglen
People
Military
Dad
" 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
" 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
" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "
Trevor Paglen
Hard
Launch
Been
" 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
Go
Need
" What started happening really quickly after 9/11 and the construction of this 'War on Terror' business is that I saw all kinds of parallels between the way that was being constructed and the way that prisons had been constructed since the early 1980s. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Business
Construction
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Army
Company
Land
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Writing
World
Support
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Pictures
Responsibility
Space
" '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
" 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
" 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
" We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. "
Trevor Paglen
Use
Build
Technology
" 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
" 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
" Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. "
Trevor Paglen
Culture
Storytelling
Music
" I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism. "
Trevor Paglen
Capitalism
Think
Monster
" 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
" If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen. "
Trevor Paglen
Create
Happen
Place
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
People
Space
Time
" 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
" 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
" Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible. "
Trevor Paglen
Invisible
Things
Way
" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "
Trevor Paglen
Internet
Business
Surveillance
" 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