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OK, next up, we have Trevor Paglen
and the six landscapes
of the savait surveillance state.
Something like that, you know, we'll work
it out. OK, thank hard place for Trevor.
Thank you, guys, all so much for coming
here, this is a fantastic honor
to be here with you all.
But let's let's get right into it.
We don't have as much time as I would
like to have,
but it's always like that.
I've been spending a lot of time in
helicopters lately.
I'm an artist, but I'm not somebody
who goes into a studio every day with
some paint and makes a mess and comes out
the at the end of the day with a painting
or anything like that.
I have a very empirical practice,
meaning I go out in the world to do
things, and they spend a lot of time
running around looking at stuff.
And one of the overarching themes
of my projects
has to do with
trying to push vision
and trying to
push perception
as far as I can,
usually to the point where it starts to
break down.
And the reason for that
is that I hope
that by investigating some of these
limited cases of vision of these limit
cases of perception that we
can kind of create a vantage point that
we can then use to look back on ourselves
with different kinds of
eyes, with fresh eyes,
if you will.
And for me, that's really what I want out
of art.
A lot of people want a lot of different
things out of the arts and people want
beauty. Some people want something nice
that hangs on their sofa or whatever.
What I want out of art is things
that help
us see the
historical moment that we're living in.
So that's what I want.
And so for me, that's
that's what this is sort of about
today. I want to talk about
secrecy,
and I want to talk
about how to go about
trying to see
secrecy.
And this is something that I've spent a
lot of time thinking about
over the years.
A lot of times people think about secrecy
as what you
get to know
versus
what you don't get to know.
So secrecy is stuff that we
don't get to know, and stuff that's not
secret
is is stuff that we
do get to know.
And I think that that way of thinking
about secrecy is wrong.
Right? I think in the first instance,
secrecy is more about
a way of
doing things.
It's a way of trying to organize
human activities.
And it has political aspects to it.
It has economic aspects to it.
It has legal aspects to it and has
cultural aspects to it.
And it's a way of trying to do things
whose goal is invisibility,
silence, obscurity.
And so in this first instance of what
secrecy is, I would think about it as
what we might call an abstract space,
a kind of organizing logic.
And they call it an abstract
space because it doesn't actually exist.
It's a it's a
it's a it's a conceptual thing.
It's a way of trying to organize things.
It's in an at first instance, secrecy is
very immaterial.
However, in the real world,
secrecy only exists
insofar as its logic
is applied to things in the world.
In other words, the
material stuff that
everything in the world is made up.
So in real life,
secrecy is
composed of infrastructures and
institutions, things like the CIA
or the NSA, economic
institutions like the
the so-called black
budget in the United
States. It also is composed of
social engineering institutions
such as the
security
classification system, legal
institutions such as the FISA
court and the state secrets, president
of the United States, and so on and so
on. So all
of that is a way of trying to underline
the fact that I don't think about secrecy
as what you get to know versus what you
don't get to know.
I think about it instead as a
kind of state within a state,
a state that operates according to a
very,
very different logic than what we would
normally think of as a democratic state
and also as a series
of material practices,
things that happen
in the world.
So the question then is
if secrecy is a way
of organizing institutions and
human activities in such a way
as to try to render them silent, to
render them invisible?
How do we go about trying
to see them right?
And sometimes when I talk about how do we
go about trying to see secrecy, I use
this metaphor from cosmology, the
metaphor of dark matter, where we
know that ninety seven percent of the
universe is made out of dark matter
and dark energy. It's stuff that we can't
see. We can't directly detect, but we
can infer its existence by the
influence that it exerts on
the visible universe.
Right. So it's something that we can only
indirectly detect.
And so in other words,
by seeing that interaction of this
invisible matter with the invisible
matter, we can learn something about it.
And I think perhaps something is true of
secrecy as well,
because I think that secrecy is an
inherently contradictory
thing. It's.
A self-contradictory thing,
and the reason for that is that
this organizing logic of
secrecy, as it has to
take hold, is as is articulated
in the material world.
It's never completely efficient.
And in the first instance,
the idea of secrecy is not efficient
because if it's true that secrecy
has to be made out of the same stuff that
the rest of the world is made out of,
stuff in the world tends to
reflect light, right?
It's visible kind of fundamentally.
And so we have this kind of original
contradiction in the idea
of secrecy. So for example, if you're
going to build
a secret airplane,
you can't build it in an invisible
factory with ghost workers, you have to
build it in a factory that looks like any
kind of other factory.
You have to build it with people
that, you know, do same kinds of things
that any other person does.
So secrecy is not efficient.
It has this originally contradiction, and
I think that that originally
contradiction
gives rise to all sorts of
other kinds of contradictions.
And so methodologically, what I'm
trying to do often is find
those contradictions.
Where does that secret
world intersect with something I can
see? Where is it intersect with
something that I can
find and.
Using that methodology, trying to
get a glimpse into
the aspects of secrecy and the
secret state that surrounds us
all of the time, but that we
really
generally have not trained ourselves to
see very well.
So when I talk about a series of these
kinds of contradictions.
One contradiction that has been
enormously helpful to me has to do with
logistics.
Logistics is logistics.
If you are going to, you know, as the
United States does, if you're going to
operate, you know, secret
wars all over the
world and you're going to have, you know,
military bases in, you know, nearly 200
countries and spying posts and spy
satellites in this sort of thing, you
need to have logistical
infrastructures to support that
to, you know, ferry people around, move
things around that sort of thing.
A crucial part of any logistical
infrastructure tends to involve
airplanes.
Just because you have to fly people
around documents around and so on and so
forth. And so a number of years ago,
this is something that I picked on
quite a lot.
I was very interested in the CIA's
extraordinary rendition program.
This is their kidnaping and torture
program that they were running all over
the world.
And one of the theories that
that this is a guy who spent some time
working with on this stuff.
One of the ideas that I
was working with an investigative
journalist and there was about a dozen
people around the world from human rights
groups, other journalists who were trying
to figure this stuff out.
One of the ideas
was that if you could
track the movements of airplanes
that were known to be involved in this
program, then you could
perhaps get
an understanding of
what the geography of this covert
action
looked like, right?
We knew people were disappearing
from all over the world.
We didn't know where there were going.
The CIA or the military would come out
and say something like, Oh, well, we,
we caught Abu Zubaydah, for example.
And then this guy wouldn't show up at
Guantanamo Bay.
And so if you thought about it,
you thought, Well, this
guy has to be in the world somewhere.
And because this guy has to be in the
world somewhere, there's got to be some
secret prisons out there.
So that's one thing we were interested
in.
Now the other kind of classic,
the classic way
that you organize logistics, if you're
the Central Intelligence Agency or
certain parts of the military is that you
create front companies, you create
fake companies to do
your logistics for you.
And this is a very, very good
idea for
several reasons.
First of all, it's a good idea because it
keeps your name off of things.
Right? So you don't you can create a fake
company that's doing stuff around the
world. It doesn't ever
say CIA or NSA
or
whatever it is anywhere in the paperwork
that you have
to file. So it's a very, very good
idea in that sense.
It's a very good idea in a second sense
as well,
which is that
there is much more freedom of movement
afforded to civilians
than there is to the world's military.
So for example, if you want to charter
airplane tomorrow and fly to Karachi,
Pakistan.
That's absolutely no problem.
You have to pay overflight fees and some
landing fees, but it's no big deal.
If you're the military to tomorrow and
you fly a bunch of planes into Karachi,
you just started a war.
So it's creating fake companies is a
great idea for freedom of movement as
well.
The problem is
with creating fake companies is that you
have to file all the same kinds of
paperwork that any other company
in the world has to file.
And the aviation industry is a highly
regulated industry.
You generate an enormous paper trail.
And so the theory was
if we can identify what
airplane companies we think are involved
in this program, we might
be able to track them
somehow and learn something about the
geography of this program.
So we're thinking about what are all
the things that I would want to be able
to do if I was a front company working
for the CIA, flying all over the world.
And one of the things that we thought of
was, well, what
I'd want to be able to do
is land at military air bases
anywhere I wanted in the world.
I want to be able to refuel
at military air bases.
And so we had the idea of writing to the
military and asking, Hey, can you
give us a list of all the civilian
companies who have clearances to land
at military
airfields and what clearances that they
what airfields have
clearances to land at?
So you get this document right here.
There's the older version, something
called the cap, and
it basically is a list of companies
who who are allowed to land at military
airfields and which ones they can do
that. It's so on this list, you'll find
things like Alaska Airlines,
you know,
UPS,
DHL, you know, mostly
companies that do
logistics also for
the military.
But when you start to get in the guts of
the vast majority of these only have
clearances to land in Kona's.
That means continental United States.
But when you get further into this
document, some weird things emerge.
You start to find companies like this
Stevens Express leasing, who has
a worldwide clearance.
They can land at any military airfield
they want.
Rich Moore Aviation.
We're going to come back to these guys.
Rapid air trans.
All of these have world wide clearances.
These very strange companies.
Path Corp.
Premiere Executive Transport
Services.
Anyway, so there's varying
degrees of what goes on with these
companies, which more aviation has, you
know, some actual places.
I got really interested in this company,
though here premiere executive transport
services who had pulled the
paperwork from the FAA
on file. And it turns out they have an
address. Premiere Executive Transport
Services three thirty nine Washington
Street Suite 202 Dedham, Massachusetts
In this building right here, they're
located on the second floor.
The sign outside says Hill and Plate U.S.
attorneys.
These are a couple of divorce lawyers
outside of Boston.
So when I went in there and asked
them to talk to somebody about premier
executive transport services, they threw
me out
I.
But I did, you know, they just
kept looking at this company, you
know, company, it's a public company has
to file all kinds of, you know, articles
of incorporation, you know, updates, tax
filings, that sort of thing.
I got real interested in people who were
on the boards and the the
the staff of
these companies started
collecting their signatures, finding
people like Colin Barnett,
Brian Davis, James
Kershaw,
Tyler
Edward Tait. This is my all time
favorite.
If you haven't figured this out yet,
Tyler, Edward Tate's not a real person.
Tyler Edward Tate has a
birthday in the 1950s, but a Social
Security number issued in the 1990s
has no credit rating.
Never got a loan from a bank.
Never got a driver's license, never got
married. Doesn't really have any of the
electronic trail that each of us generate
really every few seconds in our lives.
Tyler Edward Tate's only address
was this appeal box at this post
office outside the airport
in Washington, DC Box
two two one nine four
three.
So I did a reverse record
search on the P.O. box and hundreds
of names
show up.
And these are all these are ghosts.
These are
all of these names are people who don't
exist and they don't exist because
they're in the business of disappearing
other
people.
But going back to the
airplane companies, what you could
do because these
are civilian airplane companies, you had
a list of companies that you're
interested in. You go back to the FAA and
say, I want to see all the registration
numbers and serial numbers for all of the
airplanes that are owned by this set of
companies. So you get back the list of
airplanes, registration number, serial
numbers and you go back to the FAA and
you say, I would like to see all the
flight plans that
these particular
airplanes have ever filed with the new
start to get documents
that look like this.
You get the registration number
of
airplane landed iAd.
That means Washington Dulles.
This one right here BGR
is Bangor, Maine.
KFYI is the home of the Special Forces
Community in Fayetteville, North Carolina
III and Shannon Ireland.
MGM Guantanamo Bay.
So we started
tracking different
routes
where all these things were flying, the
idea being if you could
see multiple
flights to a single location,
perhaps that was a place to
pay some more attention to.
I'm going to
fly through this.
I've talked about this quite a lot
and there's documentation of these
projects online.
We had other sources of information
as well. This is a map drawn by
a former ghost prisoner, a guy named
Khalid El-Masri of What do you believe
the inside of one of these black
or dark prisons
look like?
And using this combination of information
tracking, flight plans and that sort of
thing, we're able
to figure out
the very probable
location of a CIA black site
north east
of Kabul.
And so in this this building.
So we flew out there and
had to spend quite a bit of time finding
a taxi
driver who knew where
this road was. This road
had been so dangerous for so long
that you wouldn't people
from before we had to find someone who'd
been driving a cab since before
the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan.
So all of our
our fixer
goes, We need to find the old man.
You know, someone who knows where this
road that you're talking about is to
start driving out there and you leave the
city behind you and
you know, you're kind of out in the
sticks in Afghanistan and we
end up in a traffic jam.
But it's not a bunch of cars.
It's a herd of
goats going across the street waiting for
these goats
to go by.
And we see the shepherd,
very old man, you know, the traditional
Afghan clothes and the whole thing, big
beard
exactly what you'd picture in your head.
But we know just, hey, this guy, this
shepherd,
he's wearing a baseball hat.
That's weird.
Waiting for
him to go by the shepherd finally turns
to look at us in the car
wearing a black baseball hat.
The letters KBR
are on that baseball
hat. KBR stands for something called
Kellogg,
Brown and Root, which is a company
that was a subsidiary of another company
called Halliburton, which of course,
was the company that Dick Cheney was
on the board of.
And so here we are in the middle of
nowhere Afghanistan next to what we
are ninety nine point ninety
nine percent positive is a secret CIA
prison. The local goat herder is wearing
a Dick Cheney baseball hat.
This is another black site
also in Kabul.
Now when you were, I'm really interested
in this front companies and because of
what I'm interested in as a want to
understand what is the domestic
architecture of a covert operation like
this look like? What does it look like at
home? What does it look like?
You know, just
what we
all imagined covert operations
being secret prisons and gruesome
scenes of torture and that sort of thing.
And that's all true.
But I wanted to understand what also
facilitates that.
What is the other kinds of architecture
that enable that?
And we've got a huge glimpse into that a
couple of years ago when two of
these front companies, so these front
companies are there,
they're sort of in this gray zone
sometimes where they do real work and
they're real businesses and they have,
you know, you know, cash flows and things
like that.
But they're also primarily doing work for
the CIA.
So what happened was two of these front
companies got in a billing dispute
over invoices, unpaid invoices for
rendition flights.
And one of the companies was this company
here, Rich Moore Aviation.
The other company was a company called
Sports Flight Airways, and this
is a company that does organizes
charter airplanes for sports
teams and the CIA.
I'm not making this up.
So anyway, this lawsuit, because
both of the companies were located in New
York, the lawsuit ended up going down in
the district court in a small court
in New York, and nobody noticed
that this thing had happened for like
three
years, including the CIA,
who didn't bother.
Nobody, you know, notice that this
lawsuit was happening, so nobody invoked
the state secrets privilege.
Nobody got it thrown out of court.
So this crazy thing that happened,
so there ended up being depositions
and, you know, evidentiary
findings in that sort of thing.
Just thousands of documents were
generated. And these people
at the human rights group reprieve in the
U.K. got their hands on this stuff
and I got it from them.
And in these documents, you find invoices
for rendition flights.
This is a fight. Washington, Guantanamo
Bay,
Bucharest robot,
you know,
without the bill is one hundred sixty
five thousand dollars, something
you know, Eurocontrol
documents invoices
for
telephone calls that were made
during the in-flight telephone calls
that these guys were making back home
to to headquarters
or whatever it was. These guys are trying
to get reimbursed for these satellite
phone bills.
Depositions.
And so I spent a long time
with all this stuff and just started
making this giant map, just trying
to understand what all of the different
relationships were that were being
outlined in these in these documents.
Turns out Dying Core was one of the big
people behind it. But then even a
dinosaur found out the names of different
managers for parts of the program.
That sort of thing.
You know, sports flight was at the center
of it.
And the sports site was also charting
with this other
whole other bunch of companies also doing
rendition flights as well that we didn't
know about.
And I just started going around and
photographing these places I wanted to
understand.
I wanted to see
the places that we're talking about in
these documents.
Here's sports flight in Long Island.
It kind of had a failed attempt to try to
tape over the name of their sign
in the depositions.
You have stuff like this who you know
who? Ron Dickey is the backup program
manager of supporting Bill Vigil.
I wanted to know what Bill
Vigil looked like, so I sat outside his
house.
Here's Ron Dickey.
Yeah, it was it was
one of their talking about another
company called
the International
Group or something in Hauts
Head's New York, U.S.
Aviation, blah blah blah prime jet in
California just wanted to see
where these places were.
The only Larry I know is Larry SEALs, I
never met him, do you know if he's
employed by anybody as far as I know the
State Department?
One note he look like
what this all adds up to is
what I think of as a very everyday
landscape.
So we're looking at an incredibly
secret, incredibly, in my opinion, evil,
covert operation and what does it look
like? It doesn't look like anything.
It looks like
the rest of the
world that's around us all of the time.
And for me, there's something actually
quite terrifying about that.
Other contradictions.
Places to find covert
activities.
Places to see secrecy
where you don't have to go far at all,
you can step outside and look up in
the sky.
In the end, there's many ways that I that
I do that I've spent a lot of time
out in Nevada.
All of the drones, pretty much in the
world, are flown by pilots based in
Nevada, north northwest
of Las Vegas.
You drive about an hour out into the
desert and there's a little air force
base out in the desert called
Creech Air Force Base.
And you kind of even have to know that
it's there.
And what you do is you go out there and
you park your car and just look
up at the sky.
You look up at the sky and it takes a
minute or so for your eyes to adjust.
And then you realize
there's all of
these little things that look like
insects flying around.
And what it is is you're seeing drones.
And so I've spent a lot of time out there
just photographing the sky generally
early in the morning.
So you have these Big Sky escapes, and
when you look a little bit closer, you
find these little, you know, guys in
there that don't belong.
A few months ago, I saw something very
remarkable out there.
It's something I'm not sure anybody's
ever seen one
of these, and not just flying
around before this, I'm pretty sure
this is one of these are que
170 sentinel drones.
And it's the weirdest sound.
It sounds like a tiny plane or something
like that once flying like.
This, of course, was the drone that the
Iranians managed to bring down a couple
of years ago.
And, yeah, so did
these kind of sky gave some really.
But when I'm looking at this stuff, I'm
not just looking to see like
there's a drone, I'm trying to
understand. What is it kind of look like
historically and I'm thinking about what
kind of images do
these kinds of things perhaps rhyme with
throughout the history of images?
I spend way too much time thinking about
Turner, and this is Turner
Turner's painting an angel in the Sun
from the the mid-19th century.
I'm trying to think about, Well, what
does that look like now?
Perhaps it
looks like the
Reaper in the Sun.
And of course, you can't see the Reaper
in here because it's like really that big
on the giant print.
I also spent a lot of time looking at the
night sky and particularly what
I'm looking for and what I'm doing is
tracking satellites and tracking
classified satellites,
tracking objects in the sky that,
you know, aren't there as it
were for for political
reasons, you know, for all the secret
things in the sky.
And it turns out, you know, we're on this
theme of contradictions, right?
That that you hate that stuff.
Secret stuff is made of the same stuff
that that everything else in the world is
made out of in the same is true of some
of the most, you know, classified
machines in the world, which are above
our heads in the night sky.
They all have to obey Kepler's
laws of planetary motion.
So if you put something in
in orbit around the Earth
and you can get a couple of good
observations of it, you can very,
very accurately model its
orbit and you can predict where
it will be to a high degree of accuracy.
And there's a group of amateur
astronomers around the world, about a
dozen guys who are really good
at this,
who this is what they do every night and
they go out with binoculars and
telescopes and that sort of thing and
measure the locations
of reconnaissance spacecraft.
And so you get numbers like this, this
is called a tele or
a two line element.
It's a series of numbers
that describe the orbit of a spacecraft.
And you can go and you know, there's
various software applications where you
can kind of plug your tele file
into a basically a sky chart
and you can predict where something will
be in the sky once you
predict where it will be in the sky.
You can go out and try to photograph
these things. Now this is a lot easier
said than done
trying to point, you know, photograph a
little tiny point of light.
This is
a photograph of
a of a system that, thanks to Ed Snowden,
we know it's called a keyhole enhanced
crystal system.
This is basically like an evil twin of
the Hubble Space Telescope that's pointed
down at Earth, and there's a whole bunch
of these things.
And what you're seeing here, that line in
the middle of the image is the spacecraft
moving through the frame over the course
of a long exposure.
And the reason this is so orange is that
you're seeing this is shot from the city.
So you're seeing the street lights and
noise pollution bouncing off low clouds.
Do you see strange things in the sky?
This is an image of a
spacecraft called
Pan that was launched a few
years ago p.a.
and and it was launched into a
geostationary orbit.
That's an orbit
that looks like this very, very far away.
So it basically
orbits around the Earth at the same rate
that the
Earth itself is rotating.
And Pan was very, very strange
for a couple of reasons.
It right here. It's this little
dot, obviously,
and
I had to actually fly to South Africa to
take this
picture because pans over the Indian
Ocean, but pan.
So normally there's all kinds of spy
satellites and classified launches that
are happening in every single
case. A classified launch will either
have a military launch, no.
Or what's called a National
Reconnaissance Office launch?
No. So the military will always announce
when they're launching some when they're
going to launch a rocket because they
don't want to think the Russians that
they're starting, you know, next World
War or something like that.
So I say we're launching a rocket.
Here's the NROL.
No.
It's going to be around this day and
around this time.
This thing, called Pan Pan,
shows up on the launch manifest and does
not show
shows up as a classified payload,
but does not have a narrow launch number
and does not have a military launch
number.
So what the hell is this thing?
There's a patch for it,
says Pan Palladium at night,
but word on the street was that Pan just
stood for pick
a name
in the patch as this rocket
going off very faintly in the smoke below
the rocket, you see this question mark.
So pan goes up and turns out later
there's a little Lockheed brochure that
mentioned in passing that that pan
was based on what I believe a Lockheed
A220 800 bus.
So. So it's basically a kind of
communication satellite goes into this
geostationary orbit
over the Indian Ocean and just sits
there. And so what the hell is this
thing? What if it's not got an NROL
or a military launch?
No. Then presumably it's
another government agency
that would have this communication
satellite over the Indian Ocean
so
that. This point, I'm just making up
conspiracy theories, the first idea that
I had with some other people was that,
OK, who would want to have a whole lot of
bandwidth over the Indian Ocean?
Who's not the NRA?
Who's not NSA?
Who's not the military?
We started to think, OK, maybe CIA.
So on the other agency that I could think
of and say it doesn't put their name on
anything. So we thought, why
would the CIA want to have like a whole
lot of bandwidth over the Indian Ocean?
The first thing you might think of as
maybe they want to talk to their guys
around the world?
But that's way overkill to have a
dedicated communication satellite to do
that. So the second thought was thinking
about,
well, actually,
let's think about what's going on here
because there's two drone wars.
There's the military one that places, you
know, in kind of active battlefields
like Iraq and Afghanistan
and so on. But all of the drones
assassinations that are going on in
places like Pakistan, Yemen
and so forth are run by the CIA.
And CIA would definitely want to have a
lot of bandwidth to to
fly those things.
The bandwidth on this spacecraft, I
think, do 40 simultaneous drone missions,
something like that.
So that was one theory.
But that theory got a little bit more
complicated because what Pan started
doing was moving around
the geostationary belt and parking
itself within clusters of other
communications satellites,
which is highly, highly unusual
behavior because
this burns up a lot of fuel and it
dramatically
reduces the usable lifetime of your
spacecraft.
So what is pan?
I don't know.
Nobody knows. I mean, who knows what the
hell this thing is one
of those things.
This is another weird little thing that
went up in 2009 on the Delta
four heavy rocket.
In January 2009, a
gigantic NASA spacecraft
went up again over the
Middle East and a friend of mine in
South Africa and astronomers said, Hey
Trevor,
you should go take a look at USA 202,
which
was the name that we're that there was
kind of publicly used for the thing
that, OK.
So I was out in the Eastern Hemisphere, a
place where I could see this thing and I
took this photograph and
USA
two or two, is
this thing right here, this really,
really bright light?
This is apparently one of the biggest,
heaviest, most expensive spacecraft
that the NASA and a row have ever made.
Supposedly, it has a giant antenna
about the size of a football
field, you know, a big umbrella shaped
antenna.
And I wrote back to my friend and said,
Yeah, I saw, you know, here's got this
picture of it. He's like, No, you're not.
You're not even pay attention to what
you're looking at, are you? And I was
like, What are you talking about? He was
like, Well, did you notice what it's next
to? And I hadn't thought about that,
even though it's right
there in the picture.
He said, Well, go, look that up.
And it turns out this little line here is
an unclassified spacecraft.
It's a spacecraft called 3A to
what the right to does is all
the satellite
telecommunications for the
Middle East.
How?
It's just right there,
see it through a telescope.
Anyway, there's other kinds of images
like this to have some fun with this,
every photographer has to have
their version of Yosemite, so my version
of Yosemite is photographing Yosemite
and you know, we've got a,
you know, one of these enhanced crystal
spacecraft in the sky photographing me
photographing Yosemite.
Yes, as we know from looking at all of
the Snowden documents, but we knew this
already, that secret societies are
obsessed
with symbols.
This has always
been the case, going back to old Roman
mystery religions where they had these
elaborate, symbolic languages that were
sort of kind of elliptically
kind of trying to describe
the the secrets that these secret
societies held.
Well, the same turns out to be true for
parts of the military and the
intelligence community as well.
And you often find that in the form
of
patches that
people wear on their uniforms.
And it turns
out that there's all these black
projects in the military and intelligence
community, and they make uniform patches
for them.
And it's the damnedest thing, I mean,
I've asked a number of these guys, why
the hell are you making uniform patches
for black
projects? And they said,
Oh, well, if we
if we didn't have a patch,
that would really look weird, right?
OK.
So you find stuff like this.
The special projects
flight test
squadron, this is a unit they're
based at Area
51 in Nevada.
This famous secret
base and all they do
is fly secret airplanes
and their patch.
It has all these symbols and all mean
stuff. So here is this radar.
You have a generic airframe, you
have this sword here.
That sword actually refers to a
classified airframe that's now been
declassified,
codified, called bird of prey.
There this thing falling from
the sky is a radar calibration
target, so it's an aluminum ball with a
known radar cross-section that you throw
out the back of an airplane.
You use it to tune a radar.
Their mascot is this wizard with a staff.
The lightning bolt in the kind of visual
language of this stuff usually represents
electronic warfare.
He's holding this sigma symbol,
which when you do the when you're doing
the engineering equations to
design stealth aircraft.
This is
like the unknown kind of ideal
radar cross section.
This is like the goal of invisibility.
And then right here
you have a collection of five stars
and one off to the side five
one. These guys work at the famous
Area 51 secret base.
Now, based on our, you
know, like looking at these kind of
questions of logistics, you realize that,
you know, there's a huge amount of
infrastructure that has to go into
something like
the special projects
flight test squadron.
If you want to have secret airplanes and
secret test pilots and the Secret Air
Base, then you need to have things like
secret air traffic controllers.
You need to have things like secret
maintenance crews down to the
point where you need to have secret
cafeteria people and secret janitor
people and secret doctors, you know,
flight surgeons and so on, and secret
data entry people into one zones on the
whole thing. If you're going to fly
secret airplanes, you need to
refuel them right.
And typically in the Air Force, the way
that you refuel the plane is with what's
called a tanker squadron.
You see you have a flying tanker in
your airplane, comes up and gets the gas
off. The tanker flies away.
So we're going to fly secret airplanes.
You need a secret tanker squadron.
Now this, they're the secret
tanker squadrons mascot.
Is this phantom guy.
The thing he's holding in his hand is a
tanker boom.
So it's like the boom that you lower
down into an airplane to refuel
it.
And then here at the bottom, we have this
it says N.K.
A.W.
T-G Dot Dot Dot
Nobody now and kW
tag is something it turns out you find on
all the patches for all the tanker
squadrons in the entire air
force
it stands for.
No one kicks
ass without tanker gas.
You quickly start to build a whole
world when you're building secret
airplanes, this blew my mind when I found
out that somebody sent me this crap.
So it turns out you have all these secret
units, the special projects guys and the
secret flight tanker squadron guys.
They all have football teams
for their squadrons,
and they all play against the other
secret squadrons in the Secret
Football League.
So I got my hands on this good thing
right here, and this is
the ring for the
football team, for the red hats,
right? And the red
hats is another secret unit also
flying out of Area 51.
You got your five stars in one.
And their motto is
more with less.
And their mascot is a
bear
climbing over the world wearing a red
hat.
If you can guess what these
guys do, you're really good.
But I'll tell you what they do is they
fly a small squadron
of stolen Soviet and
Russian MiGs, right?
And their motto is more with less because
they only have a few of these
MiGs that they fly.
Now, I knew all these symbols.
I knew a lot about the Red Hat's
Antarctica had been in that squadron.
The guy who sent me this class ring, I
wrote back to him. I said, I know what
all these symbols mean, but there's
something I don't understand right here,
b
h, as I've never seen that before.
Can you tell me what that is?
And he said, Oh yeah, I'll tell you blue
hats. Ain't shit.
Rapid capabilities office, they got their
little black world
in in the background
of their patch.
These guys are these guys are in charge
of I don't know if you heard about this,
the
X-37B space plane.
So this is the Air Force has their own
little drone version of a
space shuttle.
That's secret.
That's flying around right now.
It's kind of a reusable vehicle.
I think it's on its third mission right
now that's been lasting forever.
Here's a photograph of it in the sky
the the flight crews for
the X-37B.
This their secret drone space shuttle.
This is their patch.
And they are all organized by they're
all working under this rapid capabilities
office.
The rapid
capabilities down office, down here, this
their little
slogan is
doing God's work with other
people's money.
You know, there's a lot a lot of times
you can learn operational details about
programs based on these patterns.
I mentioned that before this thing, this
is an
older patch for the
for one odd constellation
of spacecraft called Onyx that turns out
the orbital inclinations on this patch
are
accurate.
So you
so you could find out what you know where
this constellation
of secret spacecraft was, and you can
find out what they do this
the patch says.
We own the night and it has
this picture of allies
or a cat eyes or this
theme of seeing at night.
This is an imaging orbit, so they'll only
be in this orbit if you're taking
pictures, how are you going to take
pictures at night?
Will you do it with something called a
synthetic aperture radar?
And yeah, so
here's a picture
of that thing.
I publish this stuff that road.
There was a memo
saying, Hey, guys, stop putting
operational details of the classified
spacecraft into the patches.
Guys are on to us.
So the NRO
started having to make patches that look
like this.
This is for this launched a couple of
weeks ago. This is for
the second generation of this synthetic
aperture in our imaging spacecraft.
This one's called topaz.
This is an old favorite.
Let them hate so long as they
fear.
And this one kind of sums up the whole
thing.
This is for one of these spy
satellites that suck
up, you know, one of these NSA things.
The classic in the genre.
Don't ask none of your fucking
business.
And so I want to come back to this
original contradiction to
begin wrapping up here a little bit.
The idea that you know, when you you're
making, you're doing all this secret
stuff, it fits
imperfectly into the world.
You can't make invisible factories.
You can't, you know, you have to have
infrastructures that go into these covert
operations. Infrastructures generate
paperwork that generate, you know,
invoices and crap like that.
But they also
have a material footprint
on the Earth's surface.
Lot of
places that are, you know, associated
with classified activities, of course,
are all over the world. But there's a lot
in the West in particular that are way
out in the desert.
You can't get anywhere near these things.
Many times they'll have buffer zones of
30, 40, 50, 60 miles around
them. So there's literally no place that
you can stand on public land and see
them with your eyes in many cases.
So what I started doing was,
you
know, quite literally
using tools designed for astronomy
and astrophotography, trying to
use them for terrestrial photography,
asking myself if what
if I buy a telescope that's designed to
take a picture of the planet Jupiter
and try to take a picture of a military
base, you know, 40 miles away or so?
What happens would be like if in
a traditional landscape photograph like
an Ansel Adams is probably using
something like a 50 millimeter lens.
What happens if you use a 5000 millimeter
lens instead,
where you start to see a little bit
different,
little bit of a different landscape?
And these are what some of these images
look like, this is, you know, the Area 51
that's come up a couple of times here.
This is the the
massive the big data center that the NSA
is finishing up in Utah that keeps
blowing up. But this is what
this thing is.
This is a site in West Virginia
called the code.
Name of it is Timberline.
This is another one of these NSA
eavesdropping stations.
This is where most recently
they were involved in some of the spying
on UNICEF in the UN World Health
Program was going on from here.
This is the aerospace data facility
Southwest.
This is a downlink for reconnaissance
satellites in New Mexico.
Classified a classified airbase for
operational aircraft, also
in
Nevada.
This is taken from about 18 20
miles away.
When you start photographing these, these
kind of extreme distances, you're looking
through so much heat and so much haze
that the images, you know, start to break
down, quite literally.
And so in an image
like this, which
has taken him about 40 miles away,
these are chemical and biological weapons
proving grounds in Utah.
You start to
veer towards total
abstraction.
And so in an image
like this,
you're seeing two things it's an image
of a classified military base,
but it's also a photograph of
what
it looks like when you push
the physical properties of vision
so far that they just fall apart
at 60 miles.
You start to get stuff like this,
which looks like stuff like
this.
So just
to conclude, a
week ago, a couple of thoughts.
The world is
constantly changing and
I feel like
our job
or my job as an artist is try to see
how it's constantly changing.
And one of the things I've been thinking
a lot about are images like
this earlier today of Travis
Godspeed mentioned in passing that
there was a, you know, a couple of
years ago, there was a group of guys
who were pulling
video
links from drone flights around
the world off of on open
satellite channels of just regular
communication satellites.
I got my hands on some of this stuff and
made a little film out of it.
There's weird stuff that shows up in
these feeds, like one of
the recurring themes is this clock.
No idea why,
but guys who look at these feeds like
apparently it shows up from time to time.
But I think this kind of thing is
indicative of a larger thing that is
happening within the world of images
and within the visible
world
itself. And I think that images are
perhaps fundamentally
changing right now.
Traditionally, when we think about
images, the way the images have
functioned historically
as
they function, as representations, see
an image, it represents something
you know in the world, but more and more.
I think if if we haven't reached that
point yet, then we're quickly approaching
the point where the vast majority
of images and photographs made in the
world will be made by machines
for other machines, and humans will never
see them.
Although those images will do an
extraordinary image like an extraordinary
amount of work in actively sculpting
the world. And so we're moving away
from this regime of
images just being representational and
moving towards a kind of operational
regime of images.
And that's something that I'm trying to
think about
quite a lot.
I'll leave you with a final note, which
a lot of times the first question that
everybody's going to ask me.
I'm never going to preempt that by saying
that people ask me, Do I get hassled by
law enforcement intelligence agencies and
that sort of thing? I don't like talking
about that, and I don't like talking
about that because I fundamentally think
that these are civic institutions,
right?
That
I don't think that these guys who make
patches who say, let them fear,
let them hate as long as they fear, I
don't think they get to win.
Right? And I don't think that we
should have a attitude
towards these agencies.
I don't think we should live in fear of
them.
And so this is why I speak about
these projects in the way that I do, I'm
making fun of them.
You know, you laugh about them because I
don't think that that we're
going to do very
well for ourselves if we
participate in the culture of fear that
we have towards our own civic
institutions, which is ultimately what
this is all.
And I'll take any questions if anybody's
got something.
Hi. Hi, there.
Right. If you've got questions, can you
line up between the mike behind the
microphones in the aisles?
Do we have any questions from the
internet?
Yes, we do.
Go ahead. While we line them up here.
We'll take a question from the internet
on, OK?
There are two questions from the
internet. First one is, do
you know anything about underground
bases?
Do I know anything about underground
bases? Sure, this underground bases
there.
Yeah, there's
underground bases of places like the Blue
Cube at places like NASA.
Sure.
But if you're talking about, you know,
underground bases that are deep in the
desert, in the bottom of a mountain,
there's places like no rad, of course.
But but I don't think
that there's a big underground bases that
have no footprint that we don't know
about.
Again, the logistics are just
insane to, you know, think
about
what kind of trouble are we going to have
to call it? Let's face.
Unfortunately, everything starts to get a
bit full and we all over time.
So if you've got any questions
for Trevor Trevor, we'll be down in
the lounge,
at the bar, at the bar.
You can stalk Trevor in the bar, surveil
him.