Trevor Paglen in "Secrets" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

TREVOR PAGLAN: The title of this piece is

A Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite,

and the idea here is to take technology,

take engineering, and use them
for the exact opposite

of what they normally do.

It's basically a giant balloon
that collapses into a very small cube.

The whole thing
weighs less than a pound.

You could put this on a rocket.

It would go up into a low-earth orbit,

and when you sent a signal
to it, it would inflate itself.

You'd be able to see it
from the ground.

It would look like a star
slowly moving across the sky.

It would last a few weeks,
and then it would accumulate

a lot of atmosphere drag
and burn up.

It's a very temporary thing.

Some objects are designed
to make patterns that shimmer,

other ones that flicker.

Other designs get bright
and then get dark again.

What we're doing here today
is inflation tests.

[ machine whirring ]

Trying to understand what
these objects are physically

as well as aesthetically.

- Found a hairline here.

- Yeah, there's one there.

There's another one
over here too.

I really do think of them
as post-minimalist sculptures

inspired in large part

by some very early spacecraft
that NASA built.

-All right, cool.

It was a very strange time
in the late 1950s, early 1960s

where people were putting things
into space,

but that language of spacecraft
hadn't really congealed yet.

What was Sputnik?

It was a metal ball

that went, "Beep, beep, beep,
beep, beep, beep."

There was really no point to it
other than to make it.

NASA did a project
called Pageos,

making big self-inflating balloons.

These were communication satellites.

You would be able to make a
transcontinental telephone call

by relaying a radio wave

to one of these reflective
satellites in the sky,

and then the wave
would bounce back

to somewhere else in the world.

There was something else
that they wanted to do

with these spacecrafts,
of course,

which was make better maps
for nuclear weapons.

A lot of artists at that time

were looking at them
as aesthetic objects.

Maybe they saw a world

where we didn't have to
kill ourselves with nuclear war,

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

Maybe there was
a different direction.

And that moment is something

that I'm very much trying
to understand.

We're standing here
on the southern border

of a giant military range
about the size of Switzerland

called the Nellis Range.

Just to the west of here
is the Nevada test site,

where nuclear testing
has been done

over many, many decades.

This is the center
for a lot of the drones

that are flown by the air force,
as well as various parts

of the military
and intelligence community.

The base is right by the side
of a highway.

I first found these drones
literally driving by,

looking up in the sky and going
"Hey, what's that?"

It's perfectly legal
what we're doing.

You can photograph anything
that you can see with your eyes.

We're standing on public land.

On one hand, the United States
has massive secrecy apparatuses,

but at the same time, it's also

one of the most open countries
in the world.

I grew up in the air force.

It made me very comfortable
around military culture,

that the military is a part
of what the United States is.

I lived in Texas; Washington, D.C.;
several different places overseas.

You're always being uprooted,

but on the plus side,
you're always seeing new things,

having a chance to see things
in a different way.

I've been working as an artist
for my whole life.

Ever since I was a little kid
and through high school,

I've always worked
on creative projects.

When I went to art school,
the way that art is taught

at the graduate level
is very theoretical

and comes pretty loosely
from literary theory.

What is the rhetoric of an image?

That never completely worked for me.

I wanted to go further.

Art is more than a series
of images that are disembodied.

Art is objects that live

in real places, economies,
spaces, architecture.

I was looking
for a lot of different ways

to try to find a language

That would allow me to think
about what I was doing,

and I ended up coming to geography.

Geography is about everything.

It allowed me to take ideas

from visual theory
and cultural studies

and incorporate them
into a larger landscape

that could deal
with political economy,

that could deal
with architecture,

that could deal with space.

In fact, that's what
the whole thing is about,

was the production of space.

A lot of works
that we now look at

as being classic kind of
art landscape photography,

people like Timothy O'Sullivan
Or Muybridge,

Western photographers,

you go to the National Archives

and look up
those original photographs,

they come in these giant reports
that say, you know,

"Reconnaissance survey
of the American West,

Department of War."

These were not really meant
to be landscape photographs

in the way that contemporary
landscape photographers work.

These photographers were hired
by the Department of War

to go out and document the West

for reasons of surveying
and cartography and mapmaking

but also for ideological reasons as well,
as a kind of claiming of the West.

That's interesting to me
in that tradition,

that relationship
between aesthetics and power

and technology and ideology.

Settlers, people from the Gold Rush

described this landscape
using vocabulary

that they would use
to describe Hell.

They talked about salt pillars, infernos,

this very twisted and dangerous
and terrifying place.

In terms of that tradition of
Western landscape photography,

it's something that I think
about being in dialogue with.

Perhaps it goes back
to that question of the West,

this promise
of a certain kind of freedom,

a horizon of possibility

but one that has never been
without an extreme amount of violence.

That was true
of the 19th century

with the colonization of
the West and the Indian Wars,

and it's true now, perhaps,
with the drone wars.

Pretty much no matter where
a drone in the world is flying,

there's a good chance that
that pilot is based in Nevada.

They're flying combat missions
in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan,

controlled from Nevada,

so those spaces
are folded into one another

in a very real way.

You spend some time out there,
and you realize

that there's little things
flying around

that look like insects.

Those are different drones
that are flown from Nevada.

What's interesting to me about
photographing drones at all

is continuing this exploration
of the relationship

between seeing and technology
and aesthetics and politics.

These are remotely controlled cameras
that have missiles attached to them.

They're involved in assassinations
and that sort of thing.

Looking at the drone in the sky,
for me,

is perhaps a little bit
of an echo of Turner

looking at the train

in the famous painting
Rain, Steam, and Speed.

It's a very blurry,
very abstract image of a train,

but what was happening
at that moment in time

was that trains were
some of the first examples

of things that humans had made

that moved faster
than your eye could see.

And there's crazy stories,

people being hit by trains

that were traveling
at 30 miles an hour

because they literally
could not understand

what that speed meant.

I'm trying to see
some of the objects

that are radically transforming
the way

that we understand and perceive
the world.

In Muybridge, you find
this pulling apart of time,

which gets picked up
by someone like Edgerton,

who has famous photographs of a
bullet flying through an apple,

really speeding up time.

Edgerton then gets a contract

to photograph the early
atmospheric nuclear tests,

what a nuclear explosion
looks like.

To do that kind of photography,
the triggers for his shutters

are better than the triggers in
the nuclear weapons themselves,

so the trigger for the camera
becomes incorporated

into the nuclear weapon.

A company starts called EG&G,

which is now
a major defense company.

There's a very interesting
and very messy history

of seeing, of technology,
of militarism and weapons

that are conflated

in 19th-century
landscape photography.

This question of representation
and technology

and politics and ideology

has always been a part
of the history of art–

Leonardo da Vinci,
Roman mithraic mysteries.

In terms of the limits of the way
that we often talk about art,

we fail to recognize
the production of images or art objects

has everything to do with
what is going on in a society.

What I'm doing here is
collecting badges and patches

for secret military projects.

This question of how to represent that
which must not be represented

is one of the oldest questions in art.

Most religious art in many, many
different traditions

has to do
with exactly this question.

The image of the fish, the lamb,
these are images

that would be understood
by other Christians

during the Roman Empire

but would not mean anything to
somebody who was an outsider.

United States Air Force
aerospace medicine, AFFTC,

That means
Air Force Flight Test Center,

worn by the doctors
who service pilots at Area 51,

which is kind of the famous base
that doesn't exist in Nevada.

The little slogan that they have
is "Better care nowhere,"

so there's all kinds of jokes
going on.

The figure of the dragon
usually means

a so-called signals intelligence satellite,

or an eavesdropping satellite.

It just collects cell phone calls,
any kind of radio transmission

emanating from the surface
of the earth.

It's a giant antenna.

It's the size
of a football field.

They look like umbrellas.

That stretched-out
circular antenna in these icons

translates into the image
of the dragon

with its wings outstretched,

and it looks like it's a star
joining a collection of other stars,

So it's satellite
that is joining a collection

of other satellites

that have some kind of
secret reconnaissance mission.

What are all the things
that are going on around us

that influence our lives,
our political culture,

you know, our culture at large

and yet which are invisible?

What are the things in orbit

that influence what goes on
on the surface of the Earth

but are also, in a very literal
sense, unearthly?

There's a small group of amateur astronomers
around the world

that every night go out
and look for things

that "aren't there" in the sky.

And over dozens of years,
they've put together

a kind of alternative catalog
to the night sky.

By taking observations
from these amateur astronomers,

you can model the orbits
of spacecraft

and predict exactly where
it will be in the night sky.

Satellites have to follow
Kepler's Laws

of Planetary Motion,

and so there's a real contradiction
in the sense that the military can make

all the secret stuff
that they like,

but they can't invent
secret laws of physics.

I want to– let's figure out
what time sunset is gonna be.

Sunset is gonna be at 7:50,

so I want to look at satellites
that are gonna begin, let's say,

between 8:45 and 11:45 tonight.

And here I got my list.

These are all the classified spacecraft
that will be in the sky this evening,

many of which won't be visible.

I'm just going to take a screenshot
of this trajectory and save it.

This basically
is going to give me a map

of what this spacecraft
is going to do.

And then I'm gonna put it
in a shot list,

and I'm going to say,
"Okay, at 9:10,

"We want to be looking
at this part of the sky

and for this satellite."

This is actually
what is gonna take the pictures.

This is a very simple, standard,
boring camera

with an off-the-shelf lens.

Sometimes I'll shoot
under cloudy skies

or hazy skies or clear skies.

I really try to incorporate
a wide spectrum

of atmospheric conditions into
the photographs that I take.

There's a very long tradition
of looking at the night sky.

The night sky
is a cultural mirror.

Going back to the Babylonians
or Greeks or you name it,

people have looked to the sky
for answers to the big questions.

Who are we?
Where have we come from?

Where are we going?

And that was true
of Babylonian astrologists

trying to figure out the future
based on the movement of the planets,

And that's true
of contemporary scientists

using things
like the hubble space telescope

to try to see the beginning of time
and the limits of the universe.

It's taking that trope
and twisting it around a little bit

and looking at the sky.

But instead of seeing
some kind of divine future,

we see military things.

we see surveillance machines.

The revolution that is happening
in perception right now

has to do with machines
seeing for other machines.

Humans are designing machines
and software to see for us,

and that's new.

It's something I'm just trying to
understand how to see, I guess.