106 Quotes by Trevor Paglen

Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time.

No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system.

With the geosynchronous orbit, the RAE Table maxes out. It has two answers for the orbital lifetime of a spacecraft in GSO: "greater than a million years" and "indefinite.

Beginning in the early 1960's, history began to rhyme once again when the Department of Energy and the military began setting off nuclear weapons in the desert. Mushroom clouds lit the skies, and fallout fell like snow. The explosions were called tests, but were nonetheless full-fledged dress rehearsals for Armageddon, perhaps more. Among the desert's longtime residents, the difference between "nuclear testing" and "nuclear war" was far from self-evident.

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

For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it – something that was very aggressive and dangerous – and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence.

I really do think of them as post-minimalist sculptures, inspired in large part by some very early spacecraft that NASA built.

To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right.

I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.