Trevor Paglen Quotes

The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing.

Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization‘s most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more.

Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.

I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.

Injustice drives me crazy!

When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.

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.

I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective.

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.

Religions have always adopted rich symbolic languages to signify the different aspects of their respective forms of faith and mythology.

I am not a journalist or an academic.

For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that which, by definition, cannot or must not be represented.

What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn’t its business model?

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.

It’s common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters.

Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it – not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object.

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 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.

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.

Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.

The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites.

My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people – buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah.

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.

For me, there’s something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.

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.

It’s not okay for me to behave as if I’m cynical about the future. Even if I am.

I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.

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.

I don’t put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets.

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.

Nothing that you make in the world exists in isolation from the social and political and ecological dimensions of it.

When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves?

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 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.

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.

To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic.

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.

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.

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.

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?

In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas.

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 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.

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.

If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America‘s vast intelligence infrastructure.