Quotes from Trevor Paglen

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

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.

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

I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance.

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

To me, traditional approaches to doing photography and thinking about photography feel increasingly anachronistic.

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.

I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them.

When we look at something that is alien to us, that is beyond our comprehension, what do we see but ourselves?

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.

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

Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world.

We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.

The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites.

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

Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.

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.