American - Artist | 1974 -
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
Trevor Paglen
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I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.
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Religions have always adopted rich symbolic languages to signify the different aspects of their respective forms of faith and mythology.
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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.
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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.
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I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.
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We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.
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If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure.
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The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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