TREVOR PAGLAN: The title of this piece is
A Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite,
and the idea here is to take technology,
take engineering, and use them for the exact opposite
of what they normally do.
It's basically a giant balloon that collapses into a very small cube.
The whole thing weighs less than a pound.
You could put this on a rocket.
It would go up into a low-earth orbit,
and when you sent a signal to it, it would inflate itself.
You'd be able to see it from the ground.
It would look like a star slowly moving across the sky.
It would last a few weeks, and then it would accumulate
a lot of atmosphere drag and burn up.
It's a very temporary thing.
Some objects are designed to make patterns that shimmer,
other ones that flicker.
Other designs get bright and then get dark again.
What we're doing here today is inflation tests.
[ machine whirring ]
Trying to understand what these objects are physically
as well as aesthetically.
- Found a hairline here.
- Yeah, there's one there.
There's another one over here too.
I really do think of them as post-minimalist sculptures
inspired in large part
by some very early spacecraft that NASA built.
-All right, cool.
It was a very strange time in the late 1950s, early 1960s
where people were putting things into space,
but that language of spacecraft hadn't really congealed yet.
What was Sputnik?
It was a metal ball
that went, "Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep."
There was really no point to it other than to make it.
NASA did a project called Pageos,
making big self-inflating balloons.
These were communication satellites.
You would be able to make a transcontinental telephone call
by relaying a radio wave
to one of these reflective satellites in the sky,
and then the wave would bounce back
to somewhere else in the world.
There was something else that they wanted to do
with these spacecrafts, of course,
which was make better maps for nuclear weapons.
A lot of artists at that time
were looking at them as aesthetic objects.
Maybe they saw a world
where we didn't have to kill ourselves with nuclear war,
we didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.
Maybe there was a different direction.
And that moment is something
that I'm very much trying to understand.
We're standing here on the southern border
of a giant military range about the size of Switzerland
called the Nellis Range.
Just to the west of here is the Nevada test site,
where nuclear testing has been done
over many, many decades.
This is the center for a lot of the drones
that are flown by the air force, as well as various parts
of the military and intelligence community.
The base is right by the side of a highway.
I first found these drones literally driving by,
looking up in the sky and going "Hey, what's that?"
It's perfectly legal what we're doing.
You can photograph anything that you can see with your eyes.
We're standing on public land.
On one hand, the United States has massive secrecy apparatuses,
but at the same time, it's also
one of the most open countries in the world.
I grew up in the air force.
It made me very comfortable around military culture,
that the military is a part of what the United States is.
I lived in Texas; Washington, D.C.; several different places overseas.
You're always being uprooted,
but on the plus side, you're always seeing new things,
having a chance to see things in a different way.
I've been working as an artist for my whole life.
Ever since I was a little kid and through high school,
I've always worked on creative projects.
When I went to art school, the way that art is taught
at the graduate level is very theoretical
and comes pretty loosely from literary theory.
What is the rhetoric of an image?
That never completely worked for me.
I wanted to go further.
Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied.
Art is objects that live
in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.
I was looking for a lot of different ways
to try to find a language
That would allow me to think about what I was doing,
and I ended up coming to geography.
Geography is about everything.
It allowed me to take ideas
from visual theory and cultural studies
and incorporate them into a larger landscape
that could deal with political economy,
that could deal with architecture,
that could deal with space.
In fact, that's what the whole thing is about,
was the production of space.
A lot of works that we now look at
as being classic kind of art landscape photography,
people like Timothy O'Sullivan Or Muybridge,
Western photographers,
you go to the National Archives
and look up those original photographs,
they come in these giant reports that say, you know,
"Reconnaissance survey of the American West,
Department of War."
These were not really meant to be landscape photographs
in the way that contemporary landscape photographers work.
These photographers were hired by the Department of War
to go out and document the West
for reasons of surveying and cartography and mapmaking
but also for ideological reasons as well, as a kind of claiming of the West.
That's interesting to me in that tradition,
that relationship between aesthetics and power
and technology and ideology.
Settlers, people from the Gold Rush
described this landscape using vocabulary
that they would use to describe Hell.
They talked about salt pillars, infernos,
this very twisted and dangerous and terrifying place.
In terms of that tradition of Western landscape photography,
it's something that I think about being in dialogue with.
Perhaps it goes back to that question of the West,
this promise of a certain kind of freedom,
a horizon of possibility
but one that has never been without an extreme amount of violence.
That was true of the 19th century
with the colonization of the West and the Indian Wars,
and it's true now, perhaps, with the drone wars.
Pretty much no matter where a drone in the world is flying,
there's a good chance that that pilot is based in Nevada.
They're flying combat missions in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan,
controlled from Nevada,
so those spaces are folded into one another
in a very real way.
You spend some time out there, and you realize
that there's little things flying around
that look like insects.
Those are different drones that are flown from Nevada.
What's interesting to me about photographing drones at all
is continuing this exploration of the relationship
between seeing and technology and aesthetics and politics.
These are remotely controlled cameras that have missiles attached to them.
They're involved in assassinations and that sort of thing.
Looking at the drone in the sky, for me,
is perhaps a little bit of an echo of Turner
looking at the train
in the famous painting Rain, Steam, and Speed.
It's a very blurry, very abstract image of a train,
but what was happening at that moment in time
was that trains were some of the first examples
of things that humans had made
that moved faster than your eye could see.
And there's crazy stories,
people being hit by trains
that were traveling at 30 miles an hour
because they literally could not understand
what that speed meant.
I'm trying to see some of the objects
that are radically transforming the way
that we understand and perceive the world.
In Muybridge, you find this pulling apart of time,
which gets picked up by someone like Edgerton,
who has famous photographs of a bullet flying through an apple,
really speeding up time.
Edgerton then gets a contract
to photograph the early atmospheric nuclear tests,
what a nuclear explosion looks like.
To do that kind of photography, the triggers for his shutters
are better than the triggers in the nuclear weapons themselves,
so the trigger for the camera becomes incorporated
into the nuclear weapon.
A company starts called EG&G,
which is now a major defense company.
There's a very interesting and very messy history
of seeing, of technology, of militarism and weapons
that are conflated
in 19th-century landscape photography.
This question of representation and technology
and politics and ideology
has always been a part of the history of art–
Leonardo da Vinci, Roman mithraic mysteries.
In terms of the limits of the way that we often talk about art,
we fail to recognize the production of images or art objects
has everything to do with what is going on in a society.
What I'm doing here is collecting badges and patches
for secret military projects.
This question of how to represent that which must not be represented
is one of the oldest questions in art.
Most religious art in many, many different traditions
has to do with exactly this question.
The image of the fish, the lamb, these are images
that would be understood by other Christians
during the Roman Empire
but would not mean anything to somebody who was an outsider.
United States Air Force aerospace medicine, AFFTC,
That means Air Force Flight Test Center,
worn by the doctors who service pilots at Area 51,
which is kind of the famous base that doesn't exist in Nevada.
The little slogan that they have is "Better care nowhere,"
so there's all kinds of jokes going on.
The figure of the dragon usually means
a so-called signals intelligence satellite,
or an eavesdropping satellite.
It just collects cell phone calls, any kind of radio transmission
emanating from the surface of the earth.
It's a giant antenna.
It's the size of a football field.
They look like umbrellas.
That stretched-out circular antenna in these icons
translates into the image of the dragon
with its wings outstretched,
and it looks like it's a star joining a collection of other stars,
So it's satellite that is joining a collection
of other satellites
that have some kind of secret reconnaissance mission.
What are all the things that are going on around us
that influence our lives, our political culture,
you know, our culture at large
and yet which are invisible?
What are the things in orbit
that influence what goes on on the surface of the Earth
but are also, in a very literal sense, unearthly?
There's a small group of amateur astronomers around the world
that every night go out and look for things
that "aren't there" in the sky.
And over dozens of years, they've put together
a kind of alternative catalog to the night sky.
By taking observations from these amateur astronomers,
you can model the orbits of spacecraft
and predict exactly where it will be in the night sky.
Satellites have to follow Kepler's Laws
of Planetary Motion,
and so there's a real contradiction in the sense that the military can make
all the secret stuff that they like,
but they can't invent secret laws of physics.
I want to– let's figure out what time sunset is gonna be.
Sunset is gonna be at 7:50,
so I want to look at satellites that are gonna begin, let's say,
between 8:45 and 11:45 tonight.
And here I got my list.
These are all the classified spacecraft that will be in the sky this evening,
many of which won't be visible.
I'm just going to take a screenshot of this trajectory and save it.
This basically is going to give me a map
of what this spacecraft is going to do.
And then I'm gonna put it in a shot list,
and I'm going to say, "Okay, at 9:10,
"We want to be looking at this part of the sky
and for this satellite."
This is actually what is gonna take the pictures.
This is a very simple, standard, boring camera
with an off-the-shelf lens.
Sometimes I'll shoot under cloudy skies
or hazy skies or clear skies.
I really try to incorporate a wide spectrum
of atmospheric conditions into the photographs that I take.
There's a very long tradition of looking at the night sky.
The night sky is a cultural mirror.
Going back to the Babylonians or Greeks or you name it,
people have looked to the sky for answers to the big questions.
Who are we? Where have we come from?
Where are we going?
And that was true of Babylonian astrologists
trying to figure out the future based on the movement of the planets,
And that's true of contemporary scientists
using things like the hubble space telescope
to try to see the beginning of time and the limits of the universe.
It's taking that trope and twisting it around a little bit
and looking at the sky.
But instead of seeing some kind of divine future,
we see military things.
we see surveillance machines.
The revolution that is happening in perception right now
has to do with machines seeing for other machines.
Humans are designing machines and software to see for us,
and that's new.
It's something I'm just trying to understand how to see, I guess.