Trevor Paglen

“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 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.”

“Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.”

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

“In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“What I thought was fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they're going, and what it means to be alive on the planet.”

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

“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.”

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

“Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.”

“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.”

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

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

“If you create a place where anything can happen, anything will happen.”

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