December 31, 2015 1:34 pm
Trevor Paglen: What lies beneath
Liz Jobey
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We all live under constant covert surveillance. The American
photographer’s work seeks to reveal this hidden world
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
©Metro Pictures, New York
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.
Since 9/11, what is commonly referred to as the war on terror has given governments a licence
to invest in covert operations at home and abroad. Paglen has photographed black sites in
Afghanistan and listening stations within the 13,000 square miles of America’s National Radio
Quiet Zone, central to the National Security Agency’s Echelon intelligence interception system,
where radio waves are tightly restricted. He has tracked and photographed US reconnaissance
satellites and drones — particularly reaper drones that can carry “Hellfire” missiles, used in
Iraq and against Isis. In 2012 he sent a disc etched with 100 photographs — a time capsule of
this point in human history — by satellite into geostationary orbit, where it could remain for
billions of years. Most recently he has been photographing locations off the coasts of Europe
and the US where international underwater fibre-optic cables come together before reaching
land.
Referred to as “choke points”, these are places that the NSA taps for access to international
communications data. As Paglen explains, speaking on Skype from New York: “Choke points
are places where clusters of fibre-optic cables connect the continents to each other. So the
United States is connected to Europe through a series of cables on the bottom of the ocean. And
those cables . . . all land at very specific places. There are about four on the east coast of the
United States; a couple of places in Europe. The places where they come on shore are quite
literally a ‘choke point’ in the internet. And the NSA is interested in these because if you can tap
those places, you are able to get a lot of bang for your buck. In other words, you are able to
surveil a tremendous amount of the internet because you put a tap on the bottlenecks and
everything’s got to go through [it].”
In the UK, the choke point is off the coast at Bude in Cornwall. “That coastline,” says Paglen, “is
where the fibre-optic cables go under the beach and into the plant. Sitting on the top of the cliffs
is an NSA base.” This is GCHQ Bude, jointly operated with the NSA, which also gathers
information for the Echelon network. Paglen says: “That’s the kind of thing that once you put
your goggles on, you see exactly what’s going on, but without those NSA goggles it doesn’t really
make a lot of sense.”
©Courtesy the artist
“Mid­Atlantic Crossing (MAC) NSA/GCHQ Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean”, 2015
The “goggles” analogy is a favourite image that Paglen uses to explain the importance of
learning to “see” in the same way the NSA does. In 2001, he started a work, “Code Names of the
Surveillance State”, which is an ever-growing list of the names that the NSA and GCHQ use to
disguise their various covert military and intelligence systems and operations. He exhibits the
list on gallery walls or projects it on to the façades of buildings, as he did on the Houses of
Parliament in London last year.
Teaching people how to see the society they inhabit is one of Paglen’s basic aims. “I always start
with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world,” he says.
“It sounds like an obvious thing to say but it’s a very powerful methodological premise.
Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the
earth. They’re material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them
are often immaterial — for example we might describe the internet as the Cloud or cyberspace
— those metaphors are wildly misleading. The Cloud is buildings with servers in them.”
Though he was speaking with the Skype video switched off, Paglen is a shaven-headed, neatly
bearded 41-year-old with beady blue eyes. He was born on Andrews Air Force Base in
Maryland, where his father was an air force ophthalmologist. (He has said before that he
doesn’t want people to read his childhood into his art.) He spent most of his teenage years in
Germany and returned to the US in the early 1990s to study comparative religion and
philosophy at Berkeley in California. From there he went on to an MFA at the Art Institute of
Chicago, then back to Berkeley for a PhD in geography.
©Courtesy the artist
“Columbus III, NSA/GCHQ­Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean”, 2015
He explains that trajectory like this: “I am not a religious person at all. What I thought was
fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told
themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they’re going, and what it
means to be alive on the planet. And a big part of these stories is the encounter of the
unknowable, the limits of human perception; that’s always bound up with theological
questions.”
This took him to art, and in turn to geography. He chose geography, he says, because he found
the language of art criticism too limited. “Art criticism is in many ways analogous to literary
criticism, in the sense that we think about signs and meanings and all that stuff. And that never
worked for me. I thought, ‘Art isn’t just these disembodied images that live in some extradimensional space, it’s always things in places. It’s always in buildings that have architectures
and entrance fees and trustees and they’re part of a political and economic culture, part of a
sociological climate, and traditional art theory can’t really account for that very well.’ So I was
interested in how does art live within a broader society, and geography gives you a theoretical
language with which to talk about that.
“I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the
Earth’s surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the
Earth’s surface. So for me geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of
questions and to try to think through them.”
©Courtesy the artist
“NSA/GCHQ Surveillance Base, Bude, Cornwall, UK”, 2015
In 2013, Paglen was asked by a friend, documentary film-maker Laura Poitras, to work on
Citizenfour, the film she was making about Edward Snowden, the computer analyst who leaked
information about the US surveillance of phone and internet communications. Paglen was a
cameraman on the film but he was also given access to the Snowden archive to try to work out
how to give the material Snowden was disclosing a visible form.
“I was brought on to think how you make images that help us develop a visual vocabulary with
which to see these structures. Because we really don’t. Very few people have any idea what the
internet looks like, let alone what mass surveillance really looks like. But in many ways it
doesn’t look like anything, which is oftentimes part of the aesthetic strategy that is used.
“I had to learn about a lot of infrastructure that was deeply unfamiliar to me, obviously. The
first thing I did was to go to academics and people in the communications industry and to say,
‘What is this? I really don’t understand what the internet is.’ So you start learning about data
centres and switches and rubbers and cables and landing sites and the materiality of it.” And
this is what led him to the surveillance of undersea cables.
©Courtesy the artist
“They Watch the Moon”, 2010, a classified listening station in the forests of West Virginia, within the National Radio Quiet
Zone
At first, he photographed stretches of sea and coastline where he believed the choke points to
be. “I was making these images that are essentially just like a seascape, and inside the frame of
the seascape are these cables and choke points but they’re obviously not visible because they’re
under water and under beaches. So I started to think what would happen if you learnt how to
scuba dive.” And that is what he did. He also began to correlate all the data he could find to
identify the location of the choke points under the sea. He consulted maritime navigational
charts — “you need to look at those because although cables are considered critical
infrastructure in most places, they don’t want ships dropping anchors there. So to prevent
people from pulling them up with anchors or fishing trawlers, they’ll mark them — they don’t
say what they are, they’re just little squiggly lines that say, ‘Don’t drop an anchor here.’ So that’s
one clue that you have. Then there’s a company called TeleGeography that works for the
underwater cable industry mostly and they create maps of where cables are, who owns them
and what they do. Then, you have to think about where the cable would have to come out from
under the ground — for example, if there was a reef, it would have to come out to go over.
“In some cases you’re also looking at FCC licences [the Federal Communications Commission
regulates radio, television, wire, satellite and cable communications]. You’re looking at
environmental impact reports. And you put all this stuff together and come up with what I
would think of as ‘candidate sites’. I was trying to design dives where you would swim from one
GPS co-ordinate to another and you would potentially encounter these cables or where you
should be able to see them. And that’s really how it works.” Again, he says, you have to know
where and how to look. “You have to do a lot of work to put yourself in the position to be able to
see one of these things in the first place. You don’t know whether you’re going to see it or not
but you have to put yourself where you could see it if it were going to be visible to you.”
If it sounds like there is a needle-in-a-haystack quality to all this, there is. Paglen remembers: “I
think on the first dive trip, the ship’s captain was, like, ‘OK, you have, like, a five square mile
search pattern and you’re looking for something on the bottom of the ocean that’s about four
inches in diameter and may or may not be there.’ He was, like, ‘Good luck with that.’”
©Courtesy the artist
“Untitled (Reaper Drone)”, 2013. The drone is just visible in the lower left­hand section of the image
But they found them. At an exhibition in New York last autumn, Paglen showed a series of deep
blue-green images from the depths of the ocean, in which the lines of cable were just visible in
the murk. Even so, once he had found the choke points, how was he so sure that they were the
places where the NSA had a tap? “’Cause you get it from the horse’s mouth,” he says. “In the
Snowden archive, there is a document called the Cable Master List, which is a list of all the
underwater cables that have taps on, so that’s really important, because that grounds it.
“It’s a funny document,” he adds, “because you always think [Groucho Marx-type voice]: ‘Isn’t
the one thing that you don’t do when you’re a spy, is put all the secrets in one document?’”
Much of the impact of Paglen’s work comes from the tension between the familiar, sometimes
banal images — seas, skies, deserts — and the sinister implications of what they contain. I
wondered how important it was for him, as an artist, to know that his photographs are based on
empirical evidence? Given that we all live within a context of covert surveillance, he could, after
all, make pictures that just suggest the presence of a satellite or a drone or a cable.
He rejects that idea. “I want the research that
underlies the project to be correct and solid, even
though that’s not visible in the image. Because
when you really research something and you are
paying attention, you always learn something that
you otherwise wouldn’t do. I can’t sit here and
make an image in my head. There’s a whole school
of art that thinks that’s interesting. I don’t,
particularly.”
©Trevor Paglen Studio
“Autonomy Cube”, 2015, in collaboration with Jacob
Appelbaum. When installed in a gallery, the cube creates an
open WiFi hotspot that uses the alternative Tor network to
anonymise internet use
Does he think of himself as an artist, or as a
political activist?
“I do not see myself as a political activist,” he says.
“I feel like my job is learning how to see and
creating metaphors and creating forms of seeing and making them available to other people. I
don’t think that images make arguments. There is obviously a politics to choosing where you
put your eyes. But at the end of the day, the best that images can do is to help us develop a
vocabulary with which to understand the historical moment we live in. My question is, what is
the specific story that we learn? How do we see the sky in 2015? What is the difference between
looking at the constellation of Orion and seeing reconnaissance satellites in it, versus, you
know, Van Gogh and the ‘Starry Night’? And at the end of the day that’s what I’m doing but you
have to do a lot of research to get to that point, because the world’s a complicated place and it’s
hard to see the historical moment.”
Did his work ever get him into trouble?
“I’m very conscious about breaking laws. That’s not interesting to me. However, I am interested
in exercising the rights that we have. I think that it’s important that we do live in more or less
free societies. This kind of work is perfectly legal. In America there is a very long tradition of
doing this kind of stuff, and part of the project of seeing is also to insist on your right to look,
your right to see. And giving other people the right to do that as well. It’s not only that you make
an image of something and you put it in a gallery. You’re also giving people permission to look
at something, and that’s another important thing that art can do.”
Trevor Paglen’s work is included in ‘Electronic Superhighway (2016­1966)’ at the Whitechapel
Gallery, London, January 29 to May 15. He has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse
Photography Foundation Prize 2016, at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, April 15 to
June 26; paglen.com
Photographs: Courtesy of the artist; Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco;
Trevor Paglen Studio
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