Trevor paglen biography of donald

In 1963 NASA launched the first communications satellite, Syncom 2, into a geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic Ocean. Since then, humans have slowly and methodically added to this space-based communications infrastructure. Currently, more than 800 spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit form a man-made fingerprydnad of satellites around Earth at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers. Most of these spacecraft powered down long ago, yet continue to float aimlessly around the planet. Geostationary satellites are so far from earth that their orbits never decay. The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent armatur around Earth, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, tyst floating through space long after every trace of humanity has disappeared from the planet’s surface.

Commissioned and presented bygd public art organization Creative Time, TheLast Pictures fryst vatten

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Short Profile

Name: Trevor Paglen
DOB: 1974
Place of birth: Maryland, United States
Occupation: Artist

Mr. Paglen, your art deals with the dark themes of mass surveillance, data collection, and state secrecy. What kind of reaction are you hoping for from your audience?

My goal has never been to look at things and tell people that they should be afraid of them. I think these are things we should be concerned about but I don’t think that fear is helpful. I think that in order to make the world a better place, we have to not be afraid of doing that. We have to feel constructive, we have to feel empowered, we have to feel like we have the ability to change things around us.

And I guess that can only happen when we open our eyes to what’s really going on in the world.

Right, I mean, when you’re making art, your job is to learn how to see the world around you and recognize that anything that you’re going to look at, other artists have been looking at for thousands of years. So you

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Trevor Paglen on Art in the Age of Mass Surveillance and Artificial Intelligence

Episode 49

Interview by Spencer Bailey

Trevor Paglen aspires to see the unseen. The artist explores the act of looking through various angles—such as how artificial intelligence systems have been trained to “see” and categorize the world, or the disquieting sense of being “watched” by a security camera—and creates scenarios that frequently implicate viewers in the experience. At other times, he’ll take pictures of places that are typically kept far out of sight, including the rarely seen headquarters of America’s National Security Agency, or the Mojave Desert, home to numerous military facilities, prisons, and a former nuclear testing site. Paglen, who has a Ph.D. in geography from University of California, Berkeley, also thinks about the relationship between space and time, and how the associations a person makes while looking at something—be it a landscape or a satellite in endless orbit around