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" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Look
Doing
Vision
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" Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better. "
Trevor Paglen
Space
Anything
Better
" We humans have always looked to the sky as a sounding board for asking big questions about ourselves: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? "
Trevor Paglen
Going
Always
Big
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Something
Border
Seen
" Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do. "
Trevor Paglen
Else
Than
Understood
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Creating
Easy
" I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know. "
Trevor Paglen
Politics
Think
Work
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Way
Photography
See
" If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
Look
Vast
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Flag
Think
Relationship
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Army
Company
Land
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Body
Learn
Knowledge
" Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them. "
Trevor Paglen
Am
Cave
Mean
" Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter. "
Trevor Paglen
Struggles
Matter
Reality
" For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented. "
Trevor Paglen
Question
Artists
Cannot
" I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets. "
Trevor Paglen
Day
Streets
Work
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
History
You
Data
" I am not a journalist or an academic. "
Trevor Paglen
Am
Academic
I Am
" What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model? "
Trevor Paglen
Internet
Business
Surveillance
" I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise. "
Trevor Paglen
World
Start
Say
" At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field. "
Trevor Paglen
Depth
Extreme
Field
" 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
Up
People
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Cloud
Internet
Skies
" 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
Me
" The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992. "
Trevor Paglen
Like
Old
Existence
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
Words
Photography
" 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. "
Trevor Paglen
Intelligence
People
Buildings
" 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
Us
Secret
See
" 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
Us
Looking
World
" Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture. "
Trevor Paglen
Live
Architecture
Art
" '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. "
Trevor Paglen
Think
World
Create