News/Research

Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl in Conversation

29 Nov, 2021

Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl in Conversation

BCNM alum Trevor Paglen and former ATC speaker Hito Steyerl recently spoke on their respective exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art: Factory of the Sun and Beta Space.

From the event, Trevor speaking:

The piece, when we starting about it was in a clock tower, and so intially in a former life thought a lot about clock towers weirdly as ways of organizing space and time and creating a sense of a shared reality. You know, clock is time to go to work. At noon, time to go to church what have you. It kind of creates a space and time. Then, I was also thinking about it as a kind of centralized truth, so I was thinking about other examples of that and went back to thinking about when you used to call on the phone and it would tell you the time; I think this was called popcorn in California - you call and say what the time will be. I guess in retrospect, it feels like almost a quaint and almost beautiful things that at some point there was a phone number that you could call and it would tell you the truth. So it takes that idea and pushes it forward, so it first tells you what time it will be and then it gives you some environmental data, it tells you what the temperature is, what the wind speed is. Then it starts getting a little weirder. It tells you what the temperature was at this time 50 years ago. From there, there's a series of facts that are randomly generated that get increasingly ridiculous sounding although they are all true. It can be the number of acres that have been burnt in California wildires recently. It could be how much money Jeff Bezoz made today. It's just a whole bund of different facts that it kind of takes up and for me, it points to almost that destabilizion of truth which we can say whether or not that ever existed...

Watch the recorded event here!

Learn more about the event here!