The Politics of Seeing and Being Seen

Using both the conditions and limitations of the photographic medium, Trevor Paglen's investigations into state surveillance, military operations, and data collection raise questions about truth, deception, and imagination. In this episode, Hannah Balber talks to the American photographer, author, and geographer about UFOs, psyops, the power of manipulation, and how seeing and being seen are deeply political.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
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Trevor Paglen

Transcript

Trevor Paglen: The Infrastructures that we use to interact with one another and that we use to try to inform ourselves about the world are increasingly predatory upon us. And I'm concerned about where that is going. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. My name is Ana Carabelea, and together with my colleague Hannah Balber we discuss with artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. In this episode, we talk about UFOs, AI, and the power of manipulation. Our guest is the American photographer, author, and geographer Trevor Paglen. In his work, he investigates the hidden power systems and technologies that shape our society. He is known for his investigative research into state surveillance, military operations, and data collection. His most recent photo series, "Cardinals," focuses on the sky – on unidentified flying objects, raising questions about truth, deception, and imagination. In conversation with Hannah, he discusses how the infrastructures we create shape our perception and ultimately ourselves. 

Intro Music 

Hannah Balber: Your recent project, Cardinals, explores UFOs as a way to think about truth, disinformation and imagination. You've been photographing novel aerial phenomena for the last two decades. What first made you point your camera at the sky? 

Trevor: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here today. It's a real honor to be able to speak with you. The Cardinals project is a series of photos that I've made for more than two decades, of essentially UFO photography. I've had this collection of work for quite a long time and never imagined that I would actually show it. And I think what's happened in our visual culture is something that really prompted me to think again about the relevance of this work. That is a really profound shift that's happened. Part of that has to do with generative A.I. and the arrival of a historical moment, where I can no longer tell the difference between a real photograph and a fake photograph. I think this has implications for democracy in terms of thinking about what are the shared truths that we have. We're seeing a collapse of any kind of distinction between fantasy and reality. And I think about UFO photography as being one of the ur-forms of like generative art basically, an ur-form of an image that proposes that it is tethered to an external world, but the nature of that tether is unclear. The other thread really has to do with thinking about disinformation and propaganda and psychological operations and media from the past and present that is designed to alter one's sense of reality. These are the different threads that for me are kind of coming together in this body of work and in this larger project of trying to understand what reality is when photography, as we have known it, doesn't really exist anymore. 

Hannah: The works in this series Cardinals are made with various cameras, most on analog film. You say they're entirely “undoctored”, so no A.I, no Photoshop. What exactly am I seeing when I look at these photographs? 

Trevor: What you're seeing in the image is what you expect to see. I know in some cases what object in the world made the mark in the photograph, like for example, at least one of them is a bird. But it's photographed in such a way that it doesn't look like a bird. Other objects in the photographs, I don't know what they are. A lot of them are photographed in the vicinity of military testing installations and things like that. I can say I've never seen something in the sky that defied the laws of physics and looked like something alien or something like that. But I've certainly seen lots of things in the sky that I don't know what they are.  

Hannah: How did you actually capture these objects? What was the process like? 

Trevor: So, I spend a huge amount of time in the desert and I spend a huge amount of time looking at the sky. And when I see something odd or I see something quotidian that I know I can photograph in such a way as to make it look odd, that’s the process. 

Hannah: You've described UFOs as almost magical objects that blur the lines between perception, imagination and objective reality. What fascinates you about these objects? 

Trevor: What fascinates me about these objects is that they're part imaginary, and they're part real. On one hand, they are in a category of things that is similar to angels or fairies or kind of almost like religious entities. On the other hand, they're very contemporary in the sense that we associate them with technology, a sense of humans on a planet in the universe. So, all of these things come together. And the additional layer of that is: it has to do with perception, and what is the explanatory framework that you bring to it. And so, the figure of the UFO says as much about the person seeing the UFO as it does about what the UFO itself is, in fact, probably says much more about the person seeing it. 

Hannah: UFOs have long been surrounded by secrecy, conspiracy, and even government disinformation. Why do you think they are so closely tied to technology and power? 

Trevor: One of the threads that I mentioned before has to do with this question of military psyops and Cold War techniques of trying to induce an adversary into understanding the world in accordance with what you want them to believe. You see the emergence of technological sensing systems and, in parallel to that, you see the emergence of technologies and techniques that are designed to manipulate how those sensing systems work or how they see. And you see the figure of the UFO emerges as a very powerful way of diverting attention. So, you have a whole history, for example, of the military and intelligence agencies using the figure of the UFO as a way to divert stories away from secret weapons technologies or advanced aerospace technologies. People seeing something remarkable in the sky and the Air Force saying like: “Oh no, we don't know what that was. That must have been a UFO.” When in fact, it was a secret airplane.  

Hannah: In the course of your exploration of UFOs and disinformation, you also created the video work Doty. This features Richard Doty, who in Cold War times spread UFO stories to conceal the existence of secret military projects. What does his story tell us about how UFOs have been used politically? 

Trevor: So, Doty is a really mind-bending character. He worked for something called the “Air Force Office of Special Investigations” in the 1970s and 1980s. And he worked at a military base in New Mexico called Kirtland Air Force Base. And at that time, they were doing all kinds of weird stuff at this base. They were doing experiments with lasers and with stealth airplanes and weird nuclear weapons, all kinds of things. And he would create fake documents labeled top secret. And the documents would tell stories about the U.S. government collaborating with aliens. And the stories that he crafted and sent out became the plot of a lot of mythology, like the television show The X-Files is really based on this disinformation that he created. And so, in the film that I made with him, he's talking about the craft of disinformation and the craft of PsyOps and how you put these kinds of stories together, how he used those techniques in real life against different journalists and UFO researchers. And then thirdly, he's telling you stories about the real UFOs that are not the products of disinformation. He's telling you how to do psyops, how he did them. And then you're asking yourself whether he's doing them on you at the same time. And the answer is like: Yes, he is. 

Hannah: So, UFOs, technology and disinformation are closely linked. How do your explorations of these objects connect to your broader interest in infrastructures that shape what we see, know and believe? 

Trevor: On the one hand I've done a lot of projects that are really just trying to see hidden infrastructures around us. So, I've done projects going out and photographing secret military bases or secret prisons or undersea internet cables that have taps on them or photographing secret satellites in the sky. From there, I've done a lot of projects looking at things like computer vision and artificial intelligence. And really what those projects are about is trying to understand how those technical infrastructures are looking at us. In other words, what are the politics of seeing in an AI environment or in a computer vision environment or machine learning environment? The question that I've been interested in is what are the ways in which the technical infrastructures we interact with are designed to manipulate us, designed to alter our sense of reality in order to extract some kind of value from us. I’m interested in these really dialectics of seeing, for lack of a better word, between humans and the technical environments that we surround ourselves with.  

Music  

Ana: Trevor Paglen is an author, artist, and experimental geographer. He studied art in Chicago and earned his doctorate in geography in Berkeley, California. In his practice, he explores hidden infrastructures and photographs places and objects that are not meant to be seen: from secret military bases and spy satellites to unknown flying objects in orbit. His work always involves a profound engagement with seeing and photography as a medium, with its conditions and limitations. Paglen is internationally present in museums and galleries. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth, contributed to the Oscar-winning film “Citizenfour” about whistleblower Edward Snowden, and created a radioactive sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima.  

Music 

Hannah: Until recently, we could reasonably conclude that a photograph had some connection to reality. However, in the age of A.I., it's becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between an A.I. generated photograph and a real photograph. What are the consequences of this shift? 

Trevor: I think there are a lot of consequences. At the most basic level, my concern is that we are entering a world that is much more nihilistic, like much more nihilistic visually because we can generate an image of anything that we want and either have it be convincing as an index of truth, in other words, that we can make it look enough like a photograph that we will kind of unconsciously accept that it might have some kind of truth value. In addition to that, there are all kinds of wish fulfillments that we can kind of make true through images. You can generate an image of a politician saying whatever you want. You can generate an image of Barack Obama being put in handcuffs and taken off to prison and looks just like a normal video. The visual culture that we live in is increasingly targeted for each one of us and can be tested and optimized to be predatory on each of our own affective responses to it. If you look at your social media feed, you're probably going to see something very different than what's on my social media feed, because those algorithms have tuned themselves in order to try to figure out what is going to capture your attention. Studies have shown that the more you're exposed to generated imagery, the more you're exposed to generated text, the more and more you question everything. And when you get to the point where you question everything, you have really created a very fertile ground for conspiracy theories, for a kind of disillusionment with the idea of collective project, and you create a vacuum that can easily be filled with the visual culture of fascism.  

Hannah: If images can be faked so easily, how can we still trust the media we see? 

Trevor: Yeah, that on one hand and then when you can't trust anything, what are the mechanisms that you're being asked to put your trust into? The aesthetics of the conspiracy theory is such that it is the promise to reveal to you information that is forbidden. The idea that it's hidden must be because it's true and because the powers don't want you to know about it. That's very powerful stuff. And that is being very much co-opted and utilized by some of the most reactionary parts of our societies. 

Hannah: You've said that you're interested in infrastructures and hidden infrastructures that shape our reality, that shape the way we live. What infrastructures are you talking about exactly? And how are they building us, shaping our lives? 

Trevor: When I'm talking about infrastructures, I just mean built environments. My particular focus has been more on communications infrastructures and visual infrastructures: so that means drones that are looking at the world, satellites that are looking at the world, Internet data centers. AI infrastructures have become a big part of that. So, infrastructures are not just passive things that are receptacles of the things that we put into them. They actually actively sculpt the rules or the physics for how we interact with each other, on the one hand through data extraction, surveillance, capitalism, whatever you want to call it. But you can think about it in this way that's also been emerging more for the last decade or so, which is the ways in which those infrastructures are trying to influence our worldviews, influence our beliefs, have become very good at being predatory on our kind of affective and unconscious responses to things like images and texts in order to extract value from us. The things that we see, the things that we read are increasingly designed not to inform us about the world, but to extract some kind of value from us. 

Hannah: Who built and controls these infrastructures and what interests do they actually serve? 

Trevor: So, who builds them, I mean it’s the high-level tech companies, data brokers and companies that traffic information, companies that are laying the hardware and building the GPUs and what have you. So, there’s many layers to this stack. The point, however, though, is that when we're talking about what values are built into that infrastructures, for lack of a better word, it's quite simple. It's capitalism. The existing Internet as it exists now, is not made for us to be able to communicate with each other. It's made in order to extract value from us. We're the product of much of it. The infrastructures that we use to interact with one another and that we use to try to inform ourselves about the world are increasingly predatory upon us. And I'm concerned about where that is going. 

Hannah: Do you see any hope? What would it mean to build them differently? What could be done to re-imagine infrastructures that actually serve the public good? 

Trevor: There's nothing natural about the way that contemporary communications infrastructures are made or like the logics under which they operate. In terms of things that give me hope. The first big one is everybody knows that this is a problem, from Internet researchers to young mothers with children and everybody will agree that the consequences for everything from our mental health to our sense of politics are severe and disturbing. Because we have that awareness, though, there's a lot of different things that you can do. Like on the one hand, you can think about publicly owned infrastructures. This is a classic thing that has been done in fields like energy, for example. Another thing that you could do is have some kind of comprehensive privacy legislation. In other words, we can regulate what kinds of data can be extracted from us and how that can be used. And when I say privacy, what I don't mean is that somebody is extracting your personal data and spying on you. When I say privacy, I'm talking about something like a public resource that is a collective good, where we decide that there are certain parts of our everyday lives that we do not want to subject to the logics of the market or the logics of the police. When I say we want privacy, what I say is like we want to make policing deliberately inefficient. We want to make markets deliberately inefficient because we gain something through those inefficiencies. 

Hannah: How do you see your art as a way of making sense of these invisible systems visible? What role can art play in helping us see and maybe change the systems we live inside? 

Trevor: When I make art, I think about it as being akin to trying to make new ideas or making new vocabulary words. So much of how we make sense of the world is through images and concepts that we associate with images, really a kind of broader vocabulary that we use to make sense of our surroundings. And what I hope to do and what art has done for me in the past is giving me new ways of seeing, new ways of trying to make sense of the things around me, allowing me to see things in different ways. And to me, that is a modest thing that art can aspire to, but nonetheless, one that can have profound consequences. 

Hannah: Thank you very much for the conversation. 

Trevor: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here with you today. 

Music 

Ana: That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it! Today’s episode was brought to you by Radio Ö1 and Ars Electronica. Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.