Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Trevor Paglen - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail.

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

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.

In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition.

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

We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.

Once, I got lost in the middle of the desert and had to follow the North Star to find the dirt road where my truck was parked a few miles away. Another time, I got stuck in quicksand for two days.

'The Last Pictures' is meant to create a framework to think about the long-term effects of human civilizations and the transformations we've made to the world around us. Having said that, every person in the world would have done the project differently, so in that sense, I guess it bears my creative stamp.

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.

The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

When you have an economically unequal society, you end up with huge swaths of society that are disposable, basically.

I'm pretty cynical about the future, but I feel like that's not an ethical position for me to take. It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.

I really do think of them as post-minimalist sculptures, inspired in large part by some very early spacecraft that NASA built.

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 Earth until the Sun turns into a Red Giant, about five billion years from now.

The U.S. generally wants to solve problems with coercion. That's kind of the default way the American state wants to try to solve problems. So there are many parallels between that: mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and militarism.

To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right.

For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it - something that was very aggressive and dangerous - and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.

Perhaps someday in the distant future, dinosaurs may once again rule the Earth. If they ever learn to watch the stars, then maybe they will find our ruins in the sky.

The switch has been built. Maybe you trust Barack Obama not to throw that switch, and maybe you trust George Bush not to throw that switch, but as we look towards the future, we see inequality becoming more and more acute. We're seeing more and more protests against cops and this kind of thing. We're also seeing more and more natural disasters. We're seeing more and more environmental insecurity.

Injustice drives me crazy! It really upsets me when I see politicians lying.