Trevor Paglen

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.

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.

The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992.

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 would argue that racism, for example, is a feature of machine learning - it's not a bug.

Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.

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

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

Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do.

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.

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.

I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.

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

My dad was not one of these stereotypical military people - buzz-cut, rah-rah-rah.

Oftentimes, secrecy involves creating spaces that are outside of the law but are outside the normal channels of oversight. And I think it's pretty easy to see that if you create spaces that are essentially outside the law, then you're creating spaces where anything can happen.

People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.

For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.

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.

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.