American - Artist | 1974 -
Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.
Trevor Paglen
SpaceBetterRobotsAnythingHumans
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.
RelationshipMoonThinkEarthKind
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.
PowerGovernmentDemocracyYouMeans
When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.
SkyNightLookSeeUpOurselves
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.
GoodEyesArtPeopleThinkBetter
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.
MeThinkToolsQuestionsEarthSay
I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.
WorkPoliticsThinkPoliticalKnow
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.
PowerInternetCloudEarthSkies
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.
TimeThinkPoliticalGeographyWay
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.
IntelligencePeopleDataBuildings
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?
SkyOceanWorldInformationDrones
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.
OceanWorldLookingStartSomeone
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