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" The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world. "

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" 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. "

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Body

Learn

Knowledge

" Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult. "

" In human geography, we think about landscapes as being political, social, cultural, economic, and physical things all at the same time. And that's the way that I wanted to approach the question of state secrecy. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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Late

Need

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Injustice drives me crazy! "

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Crazy

Injustice

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas. "

" 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. "

" Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition. "

Trevor Paglen

Looking

World

" 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. "

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

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Alien

Something

" 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. "

" Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better. "

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

" 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

Say