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" 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. "

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" I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes. "

Trevor Paglen

Think

Good

Eyes

" I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective. "

" 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. "

" To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic. "

Trevor Paglen

Doing

Feel

" The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing. "

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

" I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance. "

" For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites. "

Trevor Paglen

Stars

Romantic

" 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

Need

" 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. "

" I think that a lot of us subconsciously would like to live in a world in which good things were beautiful and bad things were ugly. But that's not how the world works. "

" When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves. "

Trevor Paglen

Night

Sky

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

" Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

See

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics. "

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

" Injustice drives me crazy! "

Trevor Paglen

Crazy

Injustice

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

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