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" We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail. "

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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? "

Trevor Paglen

Sky

World

Ocean

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race! "

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

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

Trevor Paglen

Artist

Changes

" Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say. "

Trevor Paglen

Hide

Society

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 people understand that they are constantly monitored, they are more conformist - they are less willing to take up controversial positions - and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy. "

Trevor Paglen

Democracy

People

" Injustice drives me crazy! "

Trevor Paglen

Crazy

Injustice

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

Trevor Paglen

Will

Civilization

" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 'The Last Pictures' is meant to create a framework to think about the long-term effects of human civilizations and the transformations we've made to the world around us. Having said that, every person in the world would have done the project differently, so in that sense, I guess it bears my creative stamp. "

" 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. "