Trevor Paglen : The Other Night Sky

Trevor Paglen The Other Night Sky Berkeley Art Museum June 1-Sept. 14, 2008 Artist Talk, June 1 3pm, reception to follow. Trevor Paglen, trained as an artist and a geographer, deploys an array of tactics—from data analysis to long distance photography and astronomy—to track and present what he calls “the other night sky.” Paglen’s “other night sky” comprises the constellations of technology employed by the United States government’s “black world” of covert military and intelligence activities that are cloaked in plain sight. This other night sky is like a shadow, sharing space with cultural projections of the night sky relative to mythic pasts and space bound futures. Borrowing a language of scientific visualization of the cosmos, Paglen photographs barely perceptible traces of these vessels amidst familiar star fields. And with a gesture toward the popular presentation of scientific knowledge in sites such as space centers and natural history museums, a digitally animated projection installation covers a large-scale globe with representations of 189 currently orbiting satellites. The presence of these satellites in orbit, with their capacity to track, record, and image individuals nearly anywhere on earth, reminds us of recent modifications to democratic society, in the form of government secrecy, that have taken us an uneasy distance from the foundations of democracy upon which this country was built. And so it echoes the early scientific work of empiricists such as Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, who hundreds of years ago looked to observable phenomena like the stars and planets in a quest for truth in the face of authoritarian institutions. Paglen’s mapping of the black world of the U.S. government represents a similar effort; like Galileo, Paglen looks upwards to the night sky, one of the oldest laboratories of rational thought, seeking answers about truth and democracy in the present moment.