Trevor Paglen

"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."

"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."

"Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany… you will never hear somebody say, ‘The Stasi never bothered me because I didn’t have anything to hide.’ That’s not a thing that people say."

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

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"I would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning — it’s not a bug."

"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!"