Trevor Paglen: What lies beneath

“The chances are that after coming into contact with Trevor Paglen’s work, the world — or at least the sky and the sea — will never look quite the same again. Artists and scientists from Ptolemy and Aristotle to Leonardo, Copernicus and Galileo, to the researchers at Nasa and Cern, have been observing the heavens and the tides through the centuries and their findings have progressively changed our understanding of the world. But rather than distant planets or the surface of the moon, Paglen’s field of interest lies closer to home. He is gathering material evidence of the systems of advanced technology that we all use every day but that — obscured by euphemisms such as “internet” and “cyberspace”, or deliberately coded and concealed by the intelligence services — we rarely see or understand. He wants to make visible the workings of the modern-day surveillance system by putting the evidence under the microscope — in this case, the powerful telescopic lens of his camera.” [link to article]