Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.
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.
I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes.
In the traditional academic literature, secrecy is thought of as a set of bureaucratic operations - hiding files and hiding information, that sort of thing.
We humans have always looked to the sky as a sounding board for asking big questions about ourselves: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.
How has the sky been transformed by drones? How has the ocean been transformed by the fact that over 90% of the world's information travels in underwater cables?
I have to admit that I'm not very good with grammar. They taught grammar in elementary and high school, but I went to public schools, so I never really learned it.
Perhaps someday in the distant future, dinosaurs may once again rule the Earth. If they ever learn to watch the stars, then maybe they will find our ruins in the sky.
I think that a lot of us subconsciously would like to live in a world in which good things were beautiful and bad things were ugly. But that's not how the world works.
Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object.
I'm pretty cynical about the future, but I feel like that's not an ethical position for me to take. It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.
On one hand, the idea of sending pictures off into the vastness of space and time seems nonsensical. On the other, I felt like the gesture carried an enormous amount of responsibility.
One of the kinds of things I'm consistently interested in is what the border between the seen and not seen is and the border between being able to perceive something and not perceive it.
I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise.
Once, I got lost in the middle of the desert and had to follow the North Star to find the dirt road where my truck was parked a few miles away. Another time, I got stuck in quicksand for two days.
I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.
The U.S. space program has mythologies attached to pioneering and conquering, but the Russian tradition is very different. In the Russian tradition, the ultimate goal of humanity was to resurrect all humans.
When people understand that they are constantly monitored, they are more conformist - they are less willing to take up controversial positions - and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.
In human geography, we think about landscapes as being political, social, cultural, economic, and physical things all at the same time. And that's the way that I wanted to approach the question of state secrecy.
In the late 19th century, Russian Cosmists such as Nikolai Fyodorov believed we need to go to space to collect all the particles of all the people who had ever lived. Cosmism says going into space is going into the past.
Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.
Traditionally, images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines, and no human being will ever see them.
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.
Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.
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.
It was a very strange time in the late 1950s/early 1960s, when people were putting things in space, but that language of spacecraft hadn't really congealed yet. A lot of artists at that time were looking at them as aesthetic objects.
What I thought was fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they're going, and what it means to be alive on the planet.
Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us - the world of images and image-making that we inhabit - it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition.
The U.S. generally wants to solve problems with coercion. That's kind of the default way the American state wants to try to solve problems. So there are many parallels between that: mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and militarism.
Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world's information goes through little tubes under the ocean. Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.
Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.
Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them.
What started happening really quickly after 9/11 and the construction of this 'War on Terror' business is that I saw all kinds of parallels between the way that was being constructed and the way that prisons had been constructed since the early 1980s.
If you are a plane-spotter, and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA.
In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.
One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it.
Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say.
The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling Earth until the Sun turns into a Red Giant, about five billion years from now.
The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.
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.
If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there's got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases.
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.
The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.
'The Last Pictures' is meant to create a framework to think about the long-term effects of human civilizations and the transformations we've made to the world around us. Having said that, every person in the world would have done the project differently, so in that sense, I guess it bears my creative stamp.
I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them.
We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail.
Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.
Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge.