American - Artist | 1974 -
I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.
Trevor Paglen
ArtThinkYouLookImportantReason
American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.
WorkIntelligenceI AmWorldLegal
Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.
WordsWorldLearnHelpAttention
Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.
ArtLookingTraditionLongSeeing
At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field.
DepthExtremeFieldThingDistances
Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it.
WorldIsolationPoliticalYouSocial
For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.
StarsRomanticMeLookingTrying
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.
BorderThingsSeenBeingSomething
For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.
MeArtistPlaceTryChangesSee
One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it.
I AmFreeYouCreateTrafficOver
Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible.
WorldLooksWayInvisibleShape
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.
VisionWorldDoingTryingYouLook
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