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" The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now. "

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" 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

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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. "

" 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. "

" I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know. "

" 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. "

" I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to. "

" Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do. "

" I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in. "

" 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. "

" Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object. "

" In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing. "

" 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. "

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

" I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored. "

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

" My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah. "

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

" 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

Secret

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" 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? "

" We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. "

" Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime. "

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

" The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites. "

" 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. "

" One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it. "

" I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism. "

" 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. "