Hidden Magazine by Brandon Scott

HIDDEN

Spring Edition Vol. 6

An Interview With

TREVER PAGLEN

EXPLORE THE UNKOWN

HIDDEN MAGAZINE

DIS APEAR ANCE

Trevor Paglen shows us images of the American West, originally photographed for military use and now considered examples of classic photography. In images that go beyond straightforward journalistic documentation, Paglen gives voice to shifting ideas of the landscape of the American West, humankind’s place in the cosmos, and the surveillance state. 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. -

They Watch the Moon

TREVOR PAGLEN

Tracing the ways in which the convergence of aesthetics, industrial design, and politics influence how we see and understand the world. 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,” laces 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 ofthe 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. This has been a very strange project to work on, as you can imagine. The notional framework is to create a collection of images for the far future, a future where there is no evidence of human civilization on Earth’s surface, but where a ring of dead spacecraft remains in orbit, perhaps for the descendants of future dinosaurs or giant squid to find. So right from the start, we have a situation that is utterly absurd. The idea that we can “communicate” anything whatsoever to anything outside our own social and historical context is preposterous. But that doesn’t change the material fact that our communications satellites will, in all likelihood, really be in orbit around Earth for the next four or five billion years (until the Sun expands into a red giant), and The Last Pictures may 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’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

HIDDEN MAGAZINE

AN ENVIORMENTAL HAZE He photograhs distant military facilities, capturing extreme telephoto images of stealth drones

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 air planes, prison systems, classified skunk worksprojects, 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, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency 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. From his vantage points at various public locations he photograhs distant military facilities, capturing extreme telephoto images of stealth drones. Turning his vision to the night sky, he traces the path of information-gathering satellites. In his series of Mylar satellites, Paglen applies advanced engineering to the creation of non-functional objects, stripping technology of its intended purpose and hoping to launch his own time capsule of photographs into geostationary orbit. Tracing the ways in which the convergence of aesthetics, industrial design, and politics influence how we see and understand the world, he shows us images of the American West, originally photographed for military use and now considered examples of classic photography. In images that go beyond straightforward journalistic documentation, Paglen gives voice to shifting ideas of the landscape of the American West, humankind’s place in the cosmos, and the surveillance state.

HIDDEN MAGAZINE

Keyhole Improved Crystal

Envasive Spectrum One of the places I’ve taken images of was the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where a lot of biotechnological and chemical weapons are developed. After a talk I gave in Utah, I met a student who had some ideas about how I could create clearer images of this facility. The images that I had produced of this facility were very impressionistic, almost like color fields. The student asked, “Why didn’t you make an image that was clearer, where you could see what was going on?” Then he realized, even if you clearly saw the top edge of that building at Dugway, what, if anything at all, would that image explain? When you’re looking at an obscure chemicals weapons facility, perhaps more abstract images can actually convey the things that go on in that facility better than the “objective-looking images.” In the images there are two things going on at the same time. On one hand, there is an image of a particular site, in which I am asking questions about that site. But on the other hand, the images are taken from so far away, through so much dust and haze and heat, that while it’s a photograph of a site, it’s also a photograph of what it looks like when you’ve pushed the physical properties of vision as far as they will go. It’s a photograph of a place, but

it’s literally a photograph of what it looks like when your physical capacity to see collapses, or begins to collapse. There are multiple things that I do as a person in the world. One of them would be recognizable as social science. I make arguments and write books about social science. Those sorts of arguments are very different from the kinds of things you can do as an image-maker. I really do think that different mediums are incommensurable. You are not able to translate a piece of music into a painting, and you cannot translate a painting into a text. There’s a cliché that an image is worth a thousand words; well it’s worth a great deal more than that, as evidenced by the number of art historical dissertations on Jackson Pollock.

The idea of the blank spot on the map goes back to early Portuguese, Spanish and English imperial maps. The blank spots were places where anything could happen,Paglen Quote 2 places of extreme violence—the Belgian Congo , for example. I saw a kind of symmetry with the spaces outside of the normal workings of the contemporary state, where there are different rules that are often times incredibly violent. In the old maps, these are places where there were people who weren’t quite people. The work that I’ve done is not so much trying to fill in these metaphorical blank spots as trying to understand how they’re produced and what sort of state capacities and powers have to be developed in order to create and sustain such places. My project was never to figure out what exactly is going on in a place like Area 51. I think that’s beside the point of my work. Instead, I want to know what state capacities you need to develop in order to have a place like Area 51, an unacknowledged airbase. There are a huge number of them. For example, if you’re going to build secret airplanes, you need to have a secret aerospace industry. You’re going to have secret research, which means that you’d need to figure out a way of organizing people in such a way that they don’t talk about what they are doing, or they don’t necessarily know the specifics of what they’re doing. So a kind of social engineering needs to take place. If you’re going to develop secret airplanes, you’re going to need to figure out how to fund them. Now, how do you fund an airplane in secret when the constitution states that all federal funding needs to be accounted for? The point being that there are enormous economic, social and political infrastructures that need to be in place to create and sustain something like classified flight testing. Over time, when you build these types of infrastructures, you end up developing a state within the state that has very different rules and different ways of operating than what we would think of as a kind of democratic state. Blank Spots on the Map is about trying to understand how, in order to make a place “disappear,” you have to develop an alternative state, an alternative economy, an alternative legal structure, and what the ramifications of doing that are.

COLOPHON Magazine: Hidden Magazine Designed By Brandon Scott, Spring 2016 Printed at Jayhawk Ink on French paper 801b text

MAGAZINE PROJECT DESCRIPTION Photography PLays a Massive role in the visual arts comunity.. I was given the opportuity to select notable a photographer to design a magazine for an interview wih the individual of choice. The Magazine must showcase the photographers work while designing layouts that most effectively communicate the Photographers work and Style to the audience. I chose the Trevor Paglen who is a Photographer and Geographer that combines both professions to expose secret government organizations. His work consists of very ambient and abstracted forms of photos so when designing my spreads, I found it diificult to place text within the parameters of a photograph.

HIDDEN MAGAZINE

HIDDEN

GEOGRAPHICAL

Spring Edition Vol. 6

DIS APEAR ANCE An Interview With

TREVER PAGLEN Trevor Paglen shows us images of the American West, originally photographed for military use and now considered examples of classic photography. In images that go beyond straightforward journalistic documentation, Paglen gives voice to shifting ideas of the landscape of the American West, humankind’s place in the cosmos, and the surveillance state. Paglen’s choices, part of his project “The Last Pictures,” were partly

EXPLORE THE UNKOWN

a reaction to the Golden Records, the messages-in-a-bottle that Carl Sagan attached to NASA’s Voyager probes in 1977. -

abstract

HIDDEN MAGAZINE

AN ENVIORMENTAL HAZE He photograhs distant military facilities, capturing extreme telephoto images of stealth drones

images

can

HIDDEN MAGAZINE

TREVOR PAGLEN

actually

convey

the

things

that

facility

better

than

the

“objective-looking

images.

it’s literally a photograph of what it looks like when your physical capacity to see collapses, or begins to collapse.

Keyhole Improved Crystal

There are multiple things that I do as a person in the world. One of them would be recognizable as social science. I make arguments and write books about social science. Those sorts of arguments are very different from the kinds of things you can do as an image-maker. I really do think that different mediums are incommensurable. You are not able to translate a piece of music into a painting, and you cannot translate a painting into a text. There’s a cliché that an image is worth a thousand words; well it’s worth a great deal more than that, as evidenced by the number of art historical dissertations on Jackson Pollock.

HIDDEN Spring Edition Vol 6

THUMBNAILS

HIDDEN Spring Edition Vol 6