Laura Knott, a curatorial associate at the MIT Museum, writes a guest essay on Trevor Paglen’s recent talk at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge:

Trevor Paglen says he’s “difficult to employ,” and it’s hard to argue with him. The New York geographer, photographer, author and chronicler of covert actions by the American military could scare off any but the most robust art department chair. He has the right credentials for a big-time academic art career (an MFA from the Chicago Art Institute), and then some (a PhD in geography from Berkeley). His work has been featured on the cover of Artforum, and it’s currently on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yet with all that, an art department could look at Trevor Paglen and see a dangerous man.

“People have always looked to the night sky to discover their own destinies,” Paglen said at his Sept. 30 talk “The Other Night Sky” at MIT’s MediaLab, as he concluded his week-long residency at the Cambridge school. Yet the mystical, astrological view of the sky has always been balanced by what we now think of as scientific investigation—the desire to gain knowledge by observing. To astrology and astronomy, Paglen argues, Americans added our own particular twists, an unquestioning optimism and a dedication to the idea of the pioneer, that led us to view space as “full of promise and potential wealth.”

Yet the night sky holds secrets that haven’t been revealed by astronomy or by astrology, promises that have little to do with optimism or pioneering, and objects that “you won’t find in your field guide to the stars.” It is those objects that propel Paglen’s work, and it’s Americans who have put them there.

There are about 8,000 active, dead or fragmented satellites in orbit around the earth. Of those 8,000, about 250 are secret American satellites. In photographs that document the existence of those satellites, Paglen’s long exposures reveal streaks of light or concentric circles, the traces of surveillance satellites on a background of stars.

Satellites that are in geostationary orbit—hovering about 22,000 miles above the equator, and orbiting at the same rate as the earth spins, each satellite keeps constant watch on a patch of earth below—will persist in their orbits for billions of years. The corollary to the idea that we see light from dead stars is that our dead satellites will be doing what they’ve always done, rotating with us—or whatever we’ve left behind—far into the future.

It’s a poignant idea. “What does it mean,” asked Paglen, “to look at the night sky and see ruins?”

When I was four years old and my parents let me stay up late to watch the Echo II satellite pass through the dark night sky over north Mississippi, I watched it allright, hanging upside down from the swingset by the backs of my knees. In a memory that may or may not be real, I think I had even then a sense that the world was different than it had been just weeks earlier, that although we were perhaps less safe than I’d thought, we were also capable of great and ingenious achievements. I was an upside-down, four-year-old optimist and a space nut, but I had misgivings. They weren’t unfounded. The space race, inspiring as it seemed at the time, was then and remains today a race for political and military domination.

Among the satellites that Paglen has followed, USA 202 was launched into geosynchronous orbit in 2009. On reaching orbit, it was positioned near a commercial satellite that handles communications for the Middle East, providing a convenient listening post for the American military. In February of 2008, Paglen and a cohort of satellite watchers witnessed the US Navy shoot down one of its own satellites, perhaps to halt an uncontrolled and dangerous descent, or maybe to prove to China, which had just shot down one of its own satellites, that we could do it too. Regardless of the Navy’s motivation, the result was an international showdown, with each nation proving the vulnerability of the other’s satellites.

It’s a lot to make art about. And this art is the real thing.

In combining the gorgeous sky, the mystical and mythical sky, with the newest and most advanced technologies, Paglen’s work has been compared to J.M.W. Turner’s steamy skies that hid locomotives. Paglen himself places his work in artistic traditions that include Agnes Martin, whose geometric paintings exude her human presence, and Alfred Steiglitz, whose photographs of dirigibles and rail engines, like Paglen’s, wrap technologies in sky and cloud. At MIT, it’s impossible not to be reminded of the SkyART movement led by Otto Piene, the long-serving director there of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Or of MIT’s long history of military R&D.

Paglen is carrying forward legacies of making and exploring, and he’s communicating the important stuff: what it is to be a smart person who wants to know what’s hidden. He may remain difficult to employ, but Trevor Paglen can perhaps be consoled by knowing that his seriousness is itself being taken seriously. An art world that’s often focused on the optically immediate and the numbingly obvious seems to be making room for things that we’re not supposed to see.

Pictured from top: Trevor Paglen, “Four Geostationary Satellites Above the Sierra Nevada,” 2007, C-print, and “STSS-1 and Two Unidentified Spacecraft over Carson City (Space Tracking and Surveillance System; USA 205),” 2010, C-print.

Trevor Paglen, “Reaper Drone (Indian Springs, NV Distance ~ 2 miles),” 2010, C-print

Trevor Paglen “Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center #2, Groom Lake, NV Distance ~ 26 Miles,” 2008, C-print

Trevor Paglen, “Keyhole Improved Crystal from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 1860),” 2008
C-print

Trevor Paglen, “MILSTAR 3 in Sagittarius (Inactive Communication and Targeting Satellite; USA 143),” 2008, C-print

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