Blindsight

Trevor Paglen has long been concerned with the vast, largely invisible edifice of secrecy and surveillance erected by both governments and huge trans-national corporations. It is a concern that has shaped his work as a visual artist for the last decade and which was evident from at least as early as 2006 when he and investigative journalist Adam Clay Thompson authored Torture Taxi, a book focussed on the CIA’s clandestine “extraordinary rendition” program.

‘I had been doing this work around military secrecy in the mid 2000s,’ Trevor said. ‘And then when Edward Snowden came along, because I was good friends with Laura Poitras [the independent filmmaker whose film about Snowden, , won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015], we started having a lot of conversations about the infrastructure that was described in the Snowden documents; this world of data centers, hacking and communications infrastructures like undersea cables