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Trevor Paglen Quotes
born 1974
Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work covers mass surveillance and data collection.In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.
Random Trevor Paglen quote
14 quotes
I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.
I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning — it’s not a bug.
At extreme distances, there is essentially no such thing as depth of field.
The world is constantly changing, and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing.
I don’t feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.
Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.
The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites.
When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.
I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.
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.
Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.
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.
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.
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.
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