Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.

Paglen earned a B.A. degree in religious studies in 1998 from the University of California at Berkeley, a M.F.A. degree in 2002 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography in 2008 from the University of California at Berkeley.

While at UC Berkeley, Paglen lived in the Berkeley Student Cooperative, residing in Chateau, Fenwick, and Rochdale co-ops.

Torture Taxi (2006), (co-authored with investigative journalist A. C. Thompson) was the first book to comprehensively describe the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

He was an Eyebeam Commissioned Artist in 2007.

I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (2007), is a look at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs.

In 2008 the Berkeley Art Museum devoted a comprehensive solo exhibition to his work.

The 2009 book Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism is largely inspired by Paglen's work.

Paglen has published a number of books.

Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World (2009) is a broader look at secrecy in the United States.

In the next year, Paglen took part in the Istanbul Biennial, and in 2010 he exhibited at the Vienna Secession.

Autonomy Cube was a project by Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum which placed relays for the anonymous communication network Tor in traditional art museums.

The Last Pictures (2012) is a collection of 100 images to be placed on permanent media and launched into space on EchoStar XVI, as a repository available for future civilizations (alien or human) to find.

Paglen has shown photography and other visual works.

Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2015, said that Paglen, whose "ongoing grand project [is] the murky world of global state surveillance and the ethics of drone warfare", "is one of the most conceptually adventurous political artists working today, and has collaborated with scientists and human rights activists on his always ambitious multimedia projects."

His visual work such as his "Limit Telephotography" and "The Other Night Sky" series have received widespread attention for both his technical innovations and for his conceptual project that involves simultaneously making and negating documentary-style truth-claims.

The contrasts between secrecy and revelation, evidence and abstraction distinguish Paglen's work.

With that the artist presents not so much "evidence" as admonitions to awareness.

In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography.

Paglen is featured in the nerd culture documentary, Traceroute (2016).

Orbital Reflector was a reflective, mylar sculpture by Paglen intended to be the first "purely artistic" object in space.

In 2017, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

The temporary satellite, containing an inflatable mylar balloon with reflective surface, launched into space 3 December 2018.

A mid-career survey in 2018–2019, Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen, was a traveling exhibition shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

In September 2020, Pace Gallery in London held an exhibition of Paglen's work, exploring "the weird, partial ways computers look back at us".

His work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum.

Paglen is credited with coining the term "Experimental Geography" to describe practices coupling experimental cultural production and art-making with ideas from critical human geography about the production of space, materialism, and praxis.