Trevor Paglen
Quotes by Trevor Paglen
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It was a very strange time in the late 1950s/early 1960s, when people were putting things in space, but that language of spacecraft hadn't really congealed yet. A lot of artists at that time were looking at them as aesthetic objects.
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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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Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more.
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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.
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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.
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When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.
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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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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.
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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?
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On one hand, the idea of sending pictures off into the vastness of space and time seems nonsensical. On the other, I felt like the gesture carried an enormous amount of responsibility.
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Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge.
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