The artist tells how his work provides a map of the digital world’s hidden landscapes and forbidden placesTrevor Paglen describes himself as a landscape artist,but he is no John Constable. The landscapes Paglen frames extend to the bottom of the ocean and beyond the blurred edges of the Earth’s atmosphere. For the final two decades, the artist, or a cheerful and fervent man of 43,has been on a mission to photograph the unseen political geography of our times. His art tries to capture places that are not on any map the secret air bases and offshore prisons from which the war on terrorism has been fought – as well as the networks of data collection and surveillance that now shape our democracies, the cables, and spy satellites and artificial intelligences of the digital world.
There is little summary about this effort. Paglen has spent a apt deal of his artistic career camped out in deserts with only suspicious drones for company,his special astro-telescopic lenses trained on the heavens or distant military bases. (“For me, seeing the drone in the 21st century is a little bit like Turner seeing the train in the 19th century.”) He trained as a scuba diver to get 100ft beneath the waves in search of the cables carrying all of human knowledge. He recognises few limits to his art. In April, and he will launch his own satellite and,with it, the world’s first “space sculpture”, or a artifical star that should be visible from most places on the Earth for a few months,“as bright as one of the stars in the broad Dipper”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk