Top 66 Trevor Paglen Quotes

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.

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.

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

Images can make realities out of people and struggles – the reality we give them. Images really matter.

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.

At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field.

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

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.

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.

If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there’s got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases.

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

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.

Creative projects are rarely the result of a single person’s efforts.

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

I am not a journalist or an academic.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Injustice drives me crazy!

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.

Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.

Technologically, it is not hard to launch an object into space. Emotionally, it has been difficult.

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.

Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that ‘photography’ and ‘seeing’ are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although the organizing logic of our nation’s surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world.

I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.

For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.

If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA.

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.

Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.

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

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.

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.

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.

I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning – it’s not a bug.

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

It’s productive and fun to try interpreting cave paintings, but ultimately, they can’t teach us anything beyond what we imagine them to be.

I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.

Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do.

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.

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

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.

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.

Traditionally, images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines, and no human being will ever see them.