TREVOR PAGLEN

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

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

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

In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.

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

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

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.

The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.

Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.

Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.

On one hand, the idea of sending pictures off into the vastness of space and time seems nonsensical. On the other, I felt like the gesture carried an enormous amount of responsibility.

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!

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.

I don't put work in an art gallery because the next day I want people to march in the streets.

Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.

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.

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.

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.

I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes.

Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more.

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

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.

I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.

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