Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said that Paglen, whose "ongoing grand project the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare", "is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects." In 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant.
Life and work
Paglen earned a B.A. in 1998 from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in geography in 2008 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently works as a researcher. While at UC Berkeley, Paglen lived in the Berkeley Student Cooperative, residing in Chateau, Rochdale, Fenwick, and Convent co-ops. Paglen has published a number of books. Torture Taxi, was the first book to comprehensively describe the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, is a look at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World is a broader look at secrecy in the United States. The Last Pictures is a collection of 100 images to be placed on permanent media and launched into space on EchoStar XVI, as a repository available for future civilizations to find. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said that Paglen, whose "ongoing grand project the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare", "is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects." His visual work such as his "Limit Telephotography" and "The Other Night Sky" series have received widespread attention for both his technical innovations and for his conceptual project that involves simultaneously making and negating documentary-style truth-claims. He was an Eyebeam Commissioned Artist in 2007. Paglen is featured in the nerd culture documentary Traceroute.
Publications
Publications by Paglen
I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2007..
Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. New York: Dutton, 2009..
Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, Photographs by Trevor Paglen. New York: Aperture, 2010.. With an essay by Rebecca Solnit.
The Last Pictures. Oakland, CA: University of California, 2012..
Trevor Paglen. London: Phaidon, 2018.. With essays by Laren Cornell, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Omar Kholeif.
Experimental Geography - Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2009.. Edited by Nato Thompson. With essays by Paglen, Thompson, and Jeffrey Kastner.
Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum - Autonomy Cube. Revolver, 2016.. Essays by Luke Skrebowski and Keller Easterling on Autonomy Cube, a piece of sculpture by Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum. In English and German.
Exhibitions
Paglen has shown photography and other visual works.
Radical Landscapes, di Rosa, Napa, February–April 2016
A Study of Invisible Images, Metro Pictures, New York, September–October 2017
Experimental Geography
Paglen is credited with coining the term "Experimental Geography" to describe practices coupling experimental cultural production and art-making with ideas from critical human geography about the production of space, materialism, and praxis. The 2009 book Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism is largely inspired by Paglen's work.
