Once, I got lost in the middle of the desert and had to follow the North Star to find the dirt road where my truck was parked a few miles away. Another time, I got stuck in quicksand for two days.
— Trevor Paglen
Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult.
Creative projects are rarely the result of a single person's efforts.
Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more.
Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic.
Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.
Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world.
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.
I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.
I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to.
The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing.
I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.
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.
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.
If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure.
'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.
The most famous secret base, I guess, would be Area 51, which a lot of people have heard of as a kind of mythical place. Well, it's a real place.
Religions have always adopted rich symbolic languages to signify the different aspects of their respective forms of faith and mythology.
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.
In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing.
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.
Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.
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.
We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.
In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.
I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets.
My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah.
I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.
The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites.
The U.S. space program has mythologies attached to pioneering and conquering, but the Russian tradition is very different. In the Russian tradition, the ultimate goal of humanity was to resurrect all humans.
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.
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.
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.
In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas.
For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented.
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.
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.
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.
It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters.
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.
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.
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.
If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen.
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.
