Trevor Paglen

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“We imagine going to the moon and planting a flag, going to an asteroid and mining, going to Mars and setting up a colony. And I think that expansionist mentality is very self-destructive, especially given the kind of precarious relationship we now have to the ecosystem here on Earth, because it allows us to imagine that Earth is disposable.”

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