The Geography of Secret Places: An Interview with Trevor Paglen

In November 2012, a silicon disc containing one hundred photographs representing life on Earth was affixed to the EchoStar XVI communications satellite and then launched into space on a Russian Proton-M rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome. To be in the enviable position of sending that disc to an orbit where it might outlast the Earth, the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen had the unenviable task of actually choosing those images.

Paglen's choices, part of his project "The Last Pictures," were partly a reaction to the Golden Records, the messages-in-a-bottle that Carl Sagan attached to NASA's Voyager probes in 1977. Those discs contained greetings in 55 different languages, an hour-long recording of brain waves, and a global music sampler. Unlike Paglen's project, however, Sagan's famous message contained no references to the uglier side of humanity, like disease, conflict, and social control.

Paglen, who holds a masters degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from Berkeley, may not seem the likeliest person to be following in the footsteps of Carl Sagan. But like Sagan, he is an explorer of mysterious things. Much of his work has been about secret stuff—the airplanes, prison systems, classified skunk works projects, and other manifestations of what he calls "the deep state," places that are "blank spots on the map."

On Monday he debuted a new set of photographs of that state—images of the headquarters of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)— taken from a helicopter with a handheld camera. With the backing of Creative Time and Pierre Omidyar's new media company, Paglen has released the photos into the public domain to replace the aging pictures that currently symbolize that otherwise hidden apparatus, to provide, he writes, more visual accompaniment to "the blizzard of code names, PowerPoint slides, court rulings and spreadsheets that have emerged from the National Security Agency's files."

It was a mission that wouldn't have had the same weight when we spoke by phone in November 2012, just before "The Last Pictures" launched and months before Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA surveillance programs. Nor would it have been possible: the camera technology didn't yet exist. ("Some of the newer generations of digital cameras are incredible low light performers," he said recently.)

But well before the NSA leaks, questions of privacy and transparency were on the top of Paglen's mind. If the conversation sounds precient at points in retrospect—Paglen describes a PRISM-like program at the end—it may be because many of the secret programs Snowden revealed had already become public, in bits and pieces, partly thanks to other intelligence community whistleblowers.

Another focus of the clandestine world Paglen documents are the spy satellites those agencies own, which themselves photograph everything on Earth in order to keep at least some of its people safe. In "The Last Pictures" the satellite becomes part of his medium. It's a medium for now and the long now: the communications platform carrying "The Last Pictures" in a geostationary orbit 36,000 miles up could theoretically last for a billion years. If a future alien civilization were to download it, Werner Herzog said prior to the launch, some of Paglen's photographic choices—a Cold War control center, a melted glacier, a Predator drone—would be "a low blow" to human civilization. But the idealized or utopian view doesn't interest Paglen. He seeks views that other people rarely do.

Motherboard: Your biographies identify you as a photographer and an artist and an experimental geographer. How do you identify yourself? You wear a number of different hats.

Trevor Paglen: I think of them all as one hat, but I just don't worry about the hats too much. I think that when I was starting out there were a lot more people asking, who is this guy? Is this art or science? Or, what is this? I guess I've always self-identified as an artist. I know there was a trope in art in the '90's where there was all this talk about artist-as-anthropologist, or artist-engineer, and I thought, well, what if you just didn't do like a pseudo art genre for everything that you did? What if you were an artist and an anthropologist and you just did art?

When did you know that you were going to be an artist?

I've been an artist my whole life pretty much. My grandmother was an artist so it's very much, you know, with the geography and the social science and "The Last Pictures," the science stuff, it all kind of came out of extending my art practice into the places I wanted to go. I had to learn a lot about different fields, but I think at the beginning and at the end of the day it was an art.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the military, on bases all over the world. So I lived in DC, Texas, California and Germany. My dad's a doctor in the Air Force.

Do you think that informed your interest in secrecy and militarization?

I don't think so. I came to that much later in life and I think a part of that was this post-9/11 moment, which I was really upset about of course. I think having had that background I wasn't really afraid of it. I kind of knew how to talk to people in the military and it didn't even feel so alien for me. When I was at Berkeley [working on a PhD] and I was doing all this fieldwork with pilots and these people that worked on secret projects, other people were like, "How can you talk to these people from another world?" And I'm like, "What are you talking about? They're just other people." I actually have a deep empathy for military culture, for how that works. I mean I'm very critical of it because I grew up in it. But I think that growing up around it was helpful for someone who didn't have that background.

What was your post 9/11 feeling?

I guess for me, I'm always paying attention to politics, and I was doing a lot of work around prisons in the 1990's and early 2000's, just trying to understand how prisons work, particularly in California. And very quickly after 9/11 it became obvious, if you kind of read between the lines of the newspapers, that there was a secret global prison system that was being set up. Because the military was saying things like, "We caught so-and-so," and these guys weren't showing up at Guantanamo Bay. And if you thought about it for five seconds you had to know that these guys were somewhere in the world. I started thinking about that, and I just saw a lot of the same dynamics that I had seen in the California prison system, that I had seen, at a much larger scale, in terms of how this war on terrorism was being put together.

Another thing I was looking at around prisons was the question of secrecy. At that time—and this has changed a little since then—there was kind of an immediate ban on media at prisons in California. You just couldn't learn very much about what was going on in there, and I could see the amount of abuse that that secrecy led to. On one hand, I also understood that the secrecy had to do with the geography of where these prisons were.

The 19th century model of prisons like Alcatraz put them in the middle of the city. The post-1980 model is, they're out way in the fields, like way in remote places. They are not a part of the physical landscape, and I was really interested in that.

And secrecy has a way of generating its own hype and concealing its successes and its failures.

Yeah, absolutely. Secrecy has very little to do with what you get to know and what you don't get to know. Secrecy is very much a set of executive powers. Secrecy for me, it's much more a question about what is the legitimate function of this state? More so than it is about whether or not you get to see a document. For example, the whole CIA drone program is officially secret right? And yet we talk about it in public and we talk about it in newspapers. But it's not part of any legal discourse because officially it's secret. Right? So that's much more typical of how secrecy works than the idea of, Oh, they're building some giant secret airplane. That's not how it's happening.

Where do you feel like we should be going with our particular policies on secrecy? Or on classification?

Well first of all, the Obama administration with regards to secrecy is like the Bush administration on steroids. I mean they are much more brutal about how they enforce this stuff. The Obama administration has revived the Espionage Act and has tried to prosecute more people than all previous administration combined. I mean even under Bush, there was a moment when Alberto Gonzalez was talking about let's try and revive this Espionage Act, and everyone was like fuck that. You know, it was shocking to people that they would try to start going there. But they are going there like non-stop now under Obama. It's not a part of the national discussion in the same way. So that's one thing.

There are many, many facets to how this question of secrecy works. Economic, cultural, political—and the way that I think about it is very much that of two states. There's a state that is, you know, the Department of Agriculture or whatever, Farm Bills and Education Bills, and that sort of thing, where you sort of know what's going on. But there's another state within the state that has it's own rules. I think about it almost like the deep state. The part of the state which is not democratic at all.

It seems like one interesting aspect is that sometimes we don't want to know things, or it's easier to not know things.

My point is that a lot of this stuff is public, but it's not that we don't want to know things. It's that the state does not want to prosecute people for torturing people. And in order to avoid prosecuting people for torture or to having a serious investigation into the legality of a program, even if everybody knows about them, you keep them out of the court system.

You keep them extralegal.

And the political issue in terms of, what is the political consciousness of the state and what are the activities of the state, can there be democratic oversight of and oversight of by, other parts of the state? So secrecy coughs out a part of the state that is not subject to congressional or judicial oversight.

Do you feel like this post 9/11-feeling is exceptional? Compared to all other previous eras when government power expanded in the face of an external threat? We made huge trade offs after 9/11, but is it different in a substantial way because of technology, because of law or politics, than it was fifty years ago?

I think so, because of geopolitics on one hand, and technology on the other hand. For example, the Reagan administration had a giant black budget— William Casey, he's the head of the CIA, fighting secret wars in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola. But there was a way in which he was kept in check by the Soviet Union. There was a Cold War going on, and there were certain places you couldn't go.

On the other hand, there simply did not exist the kinds of technologies that we have now in terms of surveillance powers. If you look at the great surveillance state of the Cold War era, the Stasi in East Germany, what the NSA is able to do now, with their data mining and surveillance program, is just orders of magnitude more that you could have ever dreamed up. And so there's a technological aspect to that. Of course, there's a political aspect to that as well.

As your work shows there's also maybe more eyes on the eyes and more scrutiny on secrecy now, especially in the past few years. Is it harder or easier to keep things secret now?

You could give an example like Wikileaks—I mean there was a phenomenal amount of stuff in there. Like secret secret. And that gave an insight into what happens under the hood, in the day to day of the government.

But for me, secrecy is not so much the information that you get access to, so much as what kinds of powers is the executive branch using to conduct its day-to-day activities. I'm not sure I think of secrecy so much as this cat and mouse game about concealing and revealing, so much as a game about how does the state prevent certain programs from having democratic or judicial oversight.

Everyone knows about the drone program. They know every single time someone kills someone in the world, but it's still a secret program. And the same thing happens with the NSA surveillance program. We know that data is being collected, it's being queried. We don't know what's being done with it, but we know it's there. But to me secrecy is more about those kinds of programs being put in place, and being declared off limits from external oversight. It's about creating a state that is within the state and that is immune from external oversight.

The patches of secret US government programs, collected by Paglen in his book "I Could Tell You … but Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed by Me." Clockwise from top left: Ghost Squadron (search and rescue); National Reconnaissance Office (dragon is code for KH-11 satellites infrared imaging capability); Desert Prowler (may represent Groom Lake, Nev., Area 51; Special Projects Office (oversaw F-117A stealth fighter); 4451st Test Squadron (stealth fighters); 413th Flight Test Squadron (could refer to simulated or real electronic threats against aircraft)

Given the amount of information that is public already, do you think these secret matters are things that people are uncomfortable knowing about?

I think that's right. There are cultural effects of secrecy which change the culture when you look at it. Again, if we use the CIA's torture program as an example of that: If you had taken a poll in 1997 of everybody in the US about whether they thought it was okay to torture people to get information about crimes out of them, I guarantee the vast majority of people would have been like, "No, are you out of your mind? Of course not." But now that's changed. A lot of people really do support that. People change their opinion because the state started doing it. The state doesn't start doing it because people change their opinion about it. There's the act of doing this stuff, and the culture changes in order to accommodate that.

You make me think of the refrain used by people in Silicon Valley—about a kind of cultural shift towards sharing personal information, towards being more public, and the idea that social media is there to meet that social shift. Versus the more subtle reading: that these things are really forcing that shift.

I agree with you in terms of that reading. That those tools and those material conditions change the culture rather than the culture changing. I don't think that everyone woke up in 2006 and was like, "Oh, I'd really like to have every every turn of my life online."

It's very funny—a friend of mine is an artist named Hassan Elahi, and a long time ago, around 2003, 2004, he built a website where he would upload all his bank account statements, every meal he had, every shit he took, just everything he did, he uploaded on the web, and all in real time. And we all thought, this guy is nuts. We thought this is the craziest project. But now all of us do this all the time with social networking stuff on the public side of it, but also on the not-so-public side of it, with law enforcement tracking peoples cell phones. And I talked to him about that recently and told him his project was sort of anachronistic now.

Are you anxious about surveillance? Does it bother you that you're being watched on some level?

Absolutely, and it's not just the state. One of the things that I question: okay, so lets say that I have a picture of you on wherever it may be, on Facebook. The question is, in ten years from now, can that change your insurance premiums? The thing is, it's these very refined data that really control our economic interactions with society. Is all the information that we upload going to mean we have individualized insurance policies with that? There's a question of state surveillance, but in most people's lives in the near to midterm future, that's the sort of thing that's really going to effect a lot of people's lives.

A more mundane creepiness.

Creepiness yeah, but also, your rights. If there's pictures of you underage drinking on Facebook, is the DMV going to say, oh you're unfit to have a drivers license? So what rights do you have, what claims do you have to participate in society?

Isn't it hard to know what we should be expecting from these kinds of companies, or any of these institutions.

I think we know exactly what to expect from them. They are going to develop a very elaborate profile of you and that profile is going to be sold to whomever wants it, for cheap. The things that go on inside companies are also a matter of secrecy, and when those decisions impact us in a big way, what kinds of demands can we reasonably place on them? It's related to the question of, at what point does something surpass our ability to comprehend the way it works?

Do you worry about this problem of complexity?

Yeah, but I think that's been true for most of history. I don't think it's something exceptional at the moment. I think that one difference is the marketplace and the state have become much more indistinguishable from one another than at any point in post-war American history. It's not a new thing in kind, but it's definitely a lot hotter, if you want to put it that way.

"The End of the Space Age," 2012, C-print.

"The Last Pictures" refers to "forever." There's a very strange vagueness about "forever."

Part of that project for me was thinking about the fact that we don't think about the future. Just what does a culture look like when its given up on a future? I think that there was a historical moment where we thought about the future a lot more than we do now. I mean you see that in all kinds of ways in politics all over the place, in terms of what kinds of investments you make in a future. And I think we invest less in the future. And I mean culturally in the US, maybe there is no future. Maybe it's just me, but in terms of denying global warming, for instance, there is a way in which our culture has turned its back on the future. And for me "The Last Pictures" is partly about trying to come to terms with that.

There's a lot of bland stuff in this project. I think it's part of often what our strategy is, as artists—to create very bizarre frames for everyday things. The idea is that by creating a very bizarre framework to see something we all kind of know, we can see it in a different way.

How did you manage to find all these pictures?

I think that was the hardest part from an artistic standpoint, or from a philosophical standpoint. The technical aspect was much much more difficult in terms of like, everyday life sucks, you know? A lot of them emerged out of a long process of interviewing some of the smartest people I could find and kind of asking them these ridiculous questions about what images should be for the future. And so those conversations I had with scientists and philosophers and other artists and anthropologists were kind of just thinking through this question.

I also spent a lot of creative time with six research assistants. We had a seminar every week and we would raid every archive we could find and just over eight months had this very long set of conversations about what we were doing and how we should approach it on a kind of more meta level, as well as a more specific conversation with particular images and topics. It was a very collaborative process and there was a huge amount of work in trying to create the landscape of those images, if that makes any sense.

Sure.

On one hand, it's a deeply ridiculous idea: to create images and then hope that somebody in a billion years is going to find them and it's going to tell them about the people. I mean, it's absurd. But at the same time I knew that if you're going to do it, you have to do it in an ethical way, because what gives you the right to do it? You have an enormous obligation to other people to have really thought through what these things are going to be, even if it's ridiculous. Because I think people care about how they are going to be represented. You can create this weird kind of record, and you have to do it in a way that is empathetic to the fact that people are invested in this thing.

To me, the project straddles that line between art and memorial. Or between art and archive. Between art and time capsule.

It's not in a gallery but from a technical standpoint, it really is probably the last pictures that will exist. And that's not a metaphor, it's real. And there's something kind of heavy about that. Even if it sounds kind of ridiculous, there is a real ethical responsibility to do that.

I love the premise of a time capsule, and the possibility that no one will ever see it.

On one hand, I think about the time capsule—it's almost like a message in a bottle, you know, who knows that's going to happen with it? But another way I think about the project is that it's a collection of images, and a human construction that is built to watch the humans, a collection of images designed to witness what happens.

That sounds like surveillance.

I think about it much more in a poetic way. Even when I talk about how images are watching people, I don't mean that in a surveillance way at all. I mean that in a "what does it mean if you imagine that these human constructions have some kind of agency?" That there is a kind of humanity that is inscribed in them that can live longer than here on Earth.

And there's also a recognition of these images as things.

Earlier a big part of the question was to what extent are we going to acknowledge these photographs as material things. And they are artifacts and they are mediated and so I was always comfortable with that. We can have pictures where you're seeing if it's shot on film, or the markings of whatever film it is, and that sort of thing was just OK for me. We don't have to show them as if they were perfect representations of the world. They can be very obviously mediated things. I didn't want to create something that was aesthetically like National Geographic. There's a kind of look to that kind of documentary photography that I actually didn't want in the project.

Today many of us have cameras in our pockets and maybe someday soon we'll also have drones to attach those cameras to. How do you think the drone fits into the way we'll see in the future?

I think they are a really big deal. Now when you look at Predator drones and this and that, I think in ten years that's going to be very anachronistic. I think there are a huge amount of legal questions that are posed by having these very cheap very mobile points of view. For example, I live on the 29th floor of a building. By 2020, will the NYPD need a warrant to park a drone outside my window and watch me 24 hours a day? Well, right now it's totally fine, but there's a huge number of questions that that brings up, and it's already starting to come up in terms of, specifically, law enforcement's use of geolocation data. There are a huge amount of questions right now that are in court—whether or not cops need a warrant to get tracking information on your cell phone, or permission from the phone company.

And then another question is, what do we do with all this data? Is it more than we can deal with? Another way of putting it is, how many photos can we take?

I think about it in a different way. Let's pretend everything that you do and everything that you viewed is in a database controlled by the state somewhere. Now, if I have access I can retroactively watch your whole life. Not right now. But whatever story I want about you I practically have evidence for that. Let's say that I want to pick you up tomorrow. Now in everybody's life, there's a way of editing any moment you want, and to me that's very terrifying in terms of these massive data collection and detention programs. And you know on the other side, the flip side, is this question of corporate power, that question of, what your insurance premium is going to be. What picture do I want to paint of you to justify what I want? Imagine you having a credit rating for everything.

Are you convinced that that kind of a system exists, based on what you've read or seen?

No, but all the elements are there. To me it seems very obvious that that is where a lot of this stuff is heading.

See a video interview with Trevor Paglen here, and Claire Evans' interview with him here.