Trevor Paglen

“I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.”

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

“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.”

“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 most famous secret base, I guess, would be Area 51, which a lot of people have heard of as a kind of mythical place. Well, it's a real place.”

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

“I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning - it's not a bug.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“I pretty much made a conscious decision to make projects a lot of people can relate to.”

“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.”

“I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.”