Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen – Art, Surveillance, and the Invisible Worlds

Explore Trevor Paglen — American artist, geographer, and investigator (born 1974). His work probes the hidden infrastructures of power, surveillance, AI, and secrecy through photography, sculpture, writing, and speculative interventions.

Introduction

Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) is an American artist, geographer, writer, and investigator whose work reveals the hidden infrastructures that shape modern life — from surveillance systems and secret military landscapes to algorithms that “see” us.

His art operates at the intersection of documentary, speculation, and critical inquiry, blending technical rigor and poetic sensibility. Paglen doesn’t simply show “what’s hidden” — he complicates the act of seeing, the power behind visibility, and our complicity in systems of control.

Early Life, Education & Intellectual Formation

Trevor Paglen was born in Camp Springs, Maryland in 1974.

He earned a B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Ph.D. in Geography, which he was awarded in 2008.

That combination — art + technical research + geography — became central to his practice. He has often framed his work under the rubric of Experimental Geography — a mode that marries cultural production (art) with geographic critique (space, power, infrastructure).

Key Themes & Artistic Practice

Seeing the Unseen

Much of Paglen’s work addresses what cannot easily be seen: secret bases, classified satellites, drone patrols, algorithmic vision. His photographic series Limit Telephotography and The Other Night Sky use telescopes, satellite tracking, long exposure, and computational tools to render invisible infrastructure visible (or at least hinted at).

He treats these works not as proof but as provocations — images that gesture toward secrecy rather than fully reveal it.

Infrastructure & Secrecy

Paglen often maps the material undergirding the digital, showing cables, data centers, drones, and classified military installations. His interest is in architecture of secrecy — how states, intelligence agencies, and corporations build worlds you don’t see — and how to make them perceptible.

He also interrogates computer vision, machine learning, and AI — asking: what do algorithms see? What biases do they carry? In works like those done with Kate Crawford (Training Humans), he makes visible the “gaze” of machines.

Speculative & Public Interventions

Paglen’s practice is not confined to galleries. Sometimes the art is itself an infrastructural object or public intervention:

  • Autonomy Cube (with Jacob Appelbaum): an acrylic cube that doubles as a Tor relay (anonymous communication network). Placed inside museums, it routes museum WiFi through Tor, making an art object also a functional tool for anonymity.

  • Orbital Reflector: a reflective, inflatable sculpture intended to orbit Earth as an “art satellite,” visible from the night sky. It was launched in December 2018, though its operational life was affected by technical issues.

  • Trinity Cube: a radioactive sculpture combining materials from the Fukushima exclusion zone and Trinitite (glass from the first atomic explosion) placed in a restricted zone in Fukushima — an artwork of contamination, memory, and material politics.

He has also launched artworks into orbit as symbolic gestures.

Major Exhibitions & Recognition

Paglen has had solo exhibitions at prominent institutions: the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), Barbican (London), Vienna Secession, Fondazione Prada (Milan), among others.

In 2018, his mid-career survey Sights Unseen was hosted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Awards and honors include:

  • Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2016.

  • MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”) in 2017.

  • Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 2014, for art intersecting technology and activism.

Selected Works & Projects

Here are a few hallmark works and projects:

Title / ProjectYear / PeriodDescription & Significance
Limit Telephotography2000s onwardUsing ultra-telephoto lenses to photograph secret military sites from public distance
The Other Night SkyOngoingTracking and photographing classified satellites and objects in orbit
Autonomy Cube (with Jacob Appelbaum)Circa 2014+Functional art: Tor relays embedded in museum sculptures Orbital Reflector2018Inflatable reflective satellite deployed into orbit as art Trinity Cubemid-2010sRadioactive sculpture combining Fukushima materials & Trinitite Last Picturesc. 2012Project sending images into space for distant future civilizations (via EchoStar satellite)

Philosophy & Approach

  • Seeing as power: Paglen considers seeing (and invisibility) as deeply political. Who is seen, who remains hidden — that is part of power.

  • Interrogating objectivity: His work resists presenting itself as neutral documentation. The framing, absence, distance are all part of meaning.

  • Materiality of the digital: He insists that digital systems are made of matter — cables, data centers, lenses — and that art can trace them.

  • Speculation & critical future: Some of his projects are speculative (e.g. satellite art) — they ask not just “what is” but “what could be.”

  • Blurring discipline lines: Paglen crosses roles — investigator, geographer, engineer, artist — resisting confinement.

Selected Quotes & Reflections

Paglen’s public statements often frame his intentions:

“When we talk about the internet or mass surveillance … we use horribly mystifying metaphors … Where is the stuff that mass surveillance is made of, and what does it look like?”

He has also said in interviews that much of his impulse comes from a desire to see the “black world” — the classified, the secret — not simply in order to expose it, but to make us aware of the gaps in our vision.

Lessons from Trevor Paglen

  1. Art can reveal hidden structures
    You don’t need to be in power to map power — careful research + creative technique can expose secrets.

  2. Invisibility is a material condition
    Something invisible is often made so by infrastructure, exclusion, zoning, classification. Unseeing is a political choice.

  3. Speculation can be method
    Art need not only document — it can imagine alternate modes of seeing, intervene, disrupt systems.

  4. Cross disciplines deliberately
    Paglen’s grounding in geography, optics, engineering amplifies his artistic voice; rigorous knowledge empowers poetic work.

  5. Question the act of seeing itself
    It’s not enough to show something; you must examine how, why, and with what implications we see.

Conclusion

Trevor Paglen is one of today’s most urgent and inventive artists — someone who uses art not as decoration but as inquiry into how power and secrecy shape our world. By combining technological rigor, poetic mystery, and geopolitical awareness, he invites us to reexamine what is visible, what is hidden, and what it means to look.

Articles by the author

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

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In a democracy, the citizens are supposed to have all the power, and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power, and citizens have very little.

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In the very near future, I guarantee that the pictures you post on social media will affect your credit rating, health and auto insurance policies, and much more. It will all happen automatically. In a very real way, our rights and freedoms will be modulated by our metadata signatures. What's at stake, obviously, is the future of the human race!

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Before Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in the 4th Century, 'mystery religions,' organized around a central canon of secret knowledge, were widespread. Membership in such religions was limited to people who had passed through secret initiation rituals and had begun to learn a body of hidden knowledge.

Trevor Paglen

American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.

Trevor Paglen

In religion, symbols have always played a iconographic and ritualistic role. Different symbols might represent different theological ideas.

Trevor Paglen

For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.

Trevor Paglen

Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.

Trevor Paglen