Trevor Paglen and the Black World

It is my understanding that before this year, the Production Lab at Eyebeam dealt mainly with 3D production and compositing. This has changed somewhat this year with the new fellows, Chris Sugrue and I. Our interests are more related to code than they are to video, and since we now make up half of the lab, this is a significant change of focus. We have been thinking about how this change should be reflected in the web presence of the lab, and even in the name of the lab, but so far no changes have emerged that seem useful. Despite the shift, the fact remains that, within Eyebeam, the Production Lab deals more with the application of technology (especially software) than the R&D or the Education Lab, so “production” is still applicable.

One function of the Production Lab is to “collaborate directly with commissioned artists to execute work, exchanging technical knowledge for artistic critique.” The first commissioned artist we are working with is Trevor Paglen. Trevor recently had a show at the Bellwether Gallery called “Black world“, in which he presented documents relating to secret government programs (think Area 51, but weapons and aircraft development and testing instead of aliens), also known as the black world. Among these documents are photographs of remote “black” military bases, taken using a technique called limit telephotography, which “most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth.” According to Trevor, in some cases, the closest he could get to these bases before being stopped by military personnel was 30 miles away, and the atmosphere between him and his otherwise-invisible subjects give the photographs a wavy, almost painterly quality that is very beautiful.

Trevor came to Eyebeam to continue working with the material he has collected. In the first few weeks of my fellowship, Trevor presented his material, which includes hundreds of photographs (some taken by him and others collected over the past few years), heavily censored documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act that discuss (ostensibly) these secret projects, stories about people whose lives have in some way been impacted by programs that don’t exist in an official sense, and other artifacts of this secret world. Trevor has published two books on these subjects, “Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights” and “Groom Lake and the Imperial Production of Nowhere”, which are serious investigations of the black world. But in his art shows, he prefers to focus on the visual language of secrecy. Trevor’s intention for this show is to investigate the different ways that the outlines of this invisible world reveal themselves. His preference is to have a gallery show that can travel around to different spaces.

So far we have discussed many possibilities for the show. One is a video production centered around the experiences of people whose lives have been impacted in some way by the black world. This would include stories from Groom Lake, another about the residents of Smithfield, North Carolina, home to an airport that acts as a central node in the CIA’s Extrodinary Rendition program, and another about the many pilots who have had long careers in the black world, and how they deal with having a largely classified life. We were also toying with the idea of designing a remote sensing unit, which would record motion, radiation, temperature, sound, and/or radio waves in the areas surrounding these bases, and either be transmitted live (although we have it on good authority that any wireless transmitters would be quickly destroyed), or recorded for long periods of time. The information could then be visualized in the gallery space.

My current favorite idea is an installation in which several of the censored documents are blown up to poster size and mounted on the wall of the space. Projectors would be mounted so that they can project onto these documents, and a program loops through the possible words that might fit into the blanks based on context and font size. This would go on for days, and people could watch the process of the software trying to un-redact (dact?) the documents.

Chris also had a great idea that involves selected images from Trevor’s collection projected on the walls, along with a camera vision system that knows when someone is looking directly at it, at which point it blurs the image. Therefore, to get a clear look at the image, you must collaborate with everyone around you to make sure no one is looking directly at the image. The resulting experience gives viewers the experience of attempting to see something that is hidden.

We have also been entertaining the idea of working with satellite data, which is a well-explored field, but something we might be able to utilize nonetheless. To his great credit, Trevor is trying very hard to work towards our interests at the Production Lab, which aren’t necessarily his own. He has some understandable misgivings about interactive gallery shows, as they are rarely executed with the level of poise and professionalism that you normally see in traditional gallery shows. But traditional gallery shows aren’t exactly the type of thing that at which Eyebeam excels, so we are trying to come up with some ideas that will make everybody happy.

So, as you can see, we have many ideas to consider, and now we need to focus and pick a direction. During the forced hiatus caused by the renovation of the Eyebeam space, our goal was to investigate the feasibility of some of these ideas, and that is what I have been doing today. I’m sure there will be many more updates on this project over the next few months.