I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.
It's common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters.
The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.
Geosynchronous spacecraft will be among civilization's most enduring remnants, quietly circling Earth until the Earth is no more.
What I thought was fascinating about comparative religion was that these were the stories that humans have told themselves about where they come from, who they are and where they're going, and what it means to be alive on the planet.
When people understand that they are constantly monitored, they are more conformist - they are less willing to take up controversial positions - and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.
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!
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.
I think of my visual work as an exploration of political epistemology: the politics of how we know what we think we know.
I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.
The dragon is a very consistent symbol of secret satellite iconography and signals intelligence satellites.
Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.
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.
One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it.
Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them.
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
Although the organizing logic of our nation's surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world.
Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.
Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.
If I was a CIA front company, what would I want to be able to do? Well, I would want to be able to land at military airfields as a civilian, so there's got to be some document that the Air Force or the Army has that would list all the civilian aircraft that are cleared to land at military bases.
