106 Quotes by Trevor Paglen

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

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

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.

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.

Engineers working in the 'black world' of classified military projects are often referred to in military circles as 'black hats.' There are a lot of jokes about the difference between 'white hats' and their spooky counterparts.

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

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.

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.

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