News/Research

Alum Trevor Paglen Profiled in The Economist

09 Feb, 2018

Alum Trevor Paglen Profiled in The Economist

Trevor Paglen and 'Orbital Reflector' was featured in 'A Space Oddity' in The Economist. The article, by Simon Willis, is published in the February/March 2018 issue and online.

From the article:

“Orbital Reflector” is the work of Trevor Paglen, an artist best known for his work photographing America’s surveillance state. In the years after the September 11th 2001 attacks, he began documenting the listening stations used by the NSA and the air-strips and secret prisons employed by the CIA in its rendition programme. He has also spent years on a project called “The Other Night Sky”, in which he photographs all the classified spy satellites in orbit, visible in the heavens but missing from the UN’s official log of spacecraft, their passages appearing as long white scratches against the blackness of space.

But the studio, where Paglen has worked since 2015, is dedicated to another project besides “Orbital Reflector”. Arrayed on desks around the edge of the room are banks of computers. During the week they are manned by software developers helping Paglen explore a different form of surveillance which, in its ubiquity and power, is both more ordinary and, in his view, more nefarious. He has been learning how machines see.

Read the rest of the article here.