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" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "
Trevor Paglen
Hard
Launch
Been
Related Quotes:
" Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them. "
Trevor Paglen
Am
Cave
Mean
" 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
" For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites. "
Trevor Paglen
Stars
Romantic
Me
" 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
" I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets. "
Trevor Paglen
Day
Streets
Work
" 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
" 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
" I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective. "
Trevor Paglen
Perspective
Vision
Think
" I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored. "
Trevor Paglen
Understand
Society
People
" I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything. "
Trevor Paglen
Make
Everything
Feel
" 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
" I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society. "
Trevor Paglen
Art
Society
Relevant
" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "
Trevor Paglen
Internet
Business
Surveillance
" Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
People
Buildings
" 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
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Never
School
High School
" The most famous secret base, I guess, would be Area 51, which a lot of people have heard of as a kind of mythical place. Well, it's a real place. "
Trevor Paglen
Place
Well
Real
" 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
" 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
" Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of. "
Trevor Paglen
Culture
Storytelling
Music
" 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
" 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
Old
Existence
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
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
" 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
" If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. "
Trevor Paglen
History
You
Data
" 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
" 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
" 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