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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. "

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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

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

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

Trevor Paglen

Will

Civilization

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Trevor Paglen

Artist

Changes

" Injustice drives me crazy! "

Trevor Paglen

Crazy

Injustice

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

" 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. "

" We imagine going to the moon and planting a flag, going to an asteroid and mining, going to Mars and setting up a colony. And I think that expansionist mentality is very self-destructive, especially given the kind of precarious relationship we now have to the ecosystem here on Earth, because it allows us to imagine that Earth is disposable. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons. "

Trevor Paglen

You

Astronomy

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky. "

" If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure. "