American - Artist | 1974 -
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
WorldStartPowerfulSayEverything
What I thought was fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they're going, and what it means to be alive on the planet.
ReligionThoughtAlivePlanetGoing
I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky.
StarsBeautifulSkyMovingNight
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.
GoodLiveBeautifulUglyGood Things
I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.
WorkMusicVisionPerformanceSee
Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.
MusicCultureStorytellingOutStuff
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!
FutureHealthSocial MediaInsurance
What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?
BusinessInternetLookSurveillance
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.
BusinessWarConstructionEarlyWay
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.
PeopleMeSocietyToolsYouHide
Injustice drives me crazy!
MeCrazyInjusticeDrives
It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.
FutureI AmMeOkayBehaveCynical
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Trevor Paglen quotes