 I'm Trevor Paglin, and I do lots of preposterous things. Really. I'm an artist, and you know, one of the things that I really want out of art, what I see the job of the artist to be is to try to learn how to see the historical moment that you find yourself living in, right? I mean that very simply, and I mean that very literally. How do you see the world around you? And this is harder to do than it might seem in many times. The world around us is a complicated place. There's all kinds of structures and forms of power that are very much a part of our everyday lives that we rarely notice. And one of the things I've been working on for 15 years or so is looking at the world of sensing, looking at the world of, you know, looking at the kind of planetary scale structures that we've been building that facilitate telecommunications, but at the same time are also instruments of mass surveillance. It's something I've taken a really close look at over the years. When we talk about surveillance, I think a lot of us have the idea, oh, there's the security cameras and then there's somebody standing behind, you know, all the monitors and looking and seeing what's going on. That image is over. It doesn't work anymore. Right now the cameras themselves are doing the operations. In other words, you have a traffic camera. That camera can detect if somebody is, you know, doing something wrong and automatically issue a ticket, right? So we're building these autonomous surveillance systems that actually intervene in the world. And a lot of people are saying that by 2020 there'll be a trillion sensors on the surface of the earth that are able to do this kind of thing. So this is something that's very much transforming not only the surface of the earth but our everyday lives as well. When we look at what these planetary infrastructures look like, on the left we see an image of what Google's global infrastructure looks like. On the right we see the National Security Agency's global infrastructure as of 2013. The point is these are literally technological systems that envelop the earth. And so one project that I've been doing is just trying to go to the places where these systems come together. Where does this infrastructure kind of congeal in very specific places? The really important part of global telecommunications is choke points. Places where transcontinental fiber optic cables come together. What are the places where the continents are connected to one another? These are really important to telecommunications but also obviously very important to surveillance. You sit on these places, you can collect most of the data that's going through the earth's telecommunication systems. What do these look like? Well, this is a place in Long Island, one of these sites. One in Northern California at Point Arena. The west coast of Hawaii. Guam is really important to this kind of thing. Marseilles in France. And what do you see in the image? Nothing, right? The point of these images is these are some of the most surveilled places on earth. These are literally kind of like core parts of global telecommunications and surveillance infrastructure. There's no evidence whatsoever that that's going on in the photos of these kind of places. What does that tell us kind of allegorically about how some of these infrastructures and systems work? I did start pushing this a little bit further. I wanted to say, well, theoretically, there should be these conjunctions of cables in these bodies of water and these images. And so I learned how to scuba dive in a swimming pool in suburban Berlin, as you do, and started going out and studying nautical charts and undersea maps to try to find places on the continental shelf where I could maybe see these. Going out with teams of divers. When you do everything right, you find images like this. As you can see, there's dozens and dozens of internet cables moving across the floor of the ocean. These are cables that connect the east coast of the United States to Europe. Now, when we're talking about planetary surveillance systems, aka planetary telecommunication systems, they're not only enveloping the earth like in a series of cables and hardware and infrastructure. They're also in disguise above our heads. In a minute of every hour, there are hundreds and hundreds of satellites over our heads. One project I've been doing, again, over many, many years, is trying to track and photograph all of the secret satellites in orbit around the planet, all the unacknowledged satellites. This is done using data from amateur astronomers. Amateur astronomers go out, they see something in the sky, they look it up in the catalog, it's not there. They know they've seen a secret satellite, which is usually an American military or intelligence satellite. They write down what they saw. What I can do is I can take that observation, model that orbit, and then go out at night, model the orbit, make a prediction about where something will be, and then using telescopes and kind of computer-guided mounts. I can pinpoint a place in the sky where I think it'll be. If you do everything right, which is rare, you get an image like this. And this line here is the streak of something called the X-37B, for example. This is an American secret space drone that's currently on its fourth mission. The X-37B. So I get into the culture a little bit of these things. This is the crew patch of the guys that fly this thing. And this is the program office that controls it, an outfit called the Rapid Capabilities Office, who have this motto here in Latin, Opus Dei, blah, blah, blah, doing God's work with other people's money. So this is kind of a glimpse into the culture of this kind of stuff. So the point is, like, we have surveillance systems that exist at the scale of the planet, that literally envelop the surface of the Earth and literally envelop the heavens above the Earth. But these scale down in various ways. These are also articulated, of course, at the scales of cities, down to the scales of living rooms, down to the scales of our bodies, down to the scales even of our thoughts and the questions that we ask. One of the set of tools that have been developing in the studio for the last couple of years is a set of tools that allow us to make images that show us what a computer vision system might see as it looks in the world, what a neural network might see as it looks through the world. In other words, tools that make us images showing us what autonomous sensing systems are actually perceiving when they look out at the world. This, for example, is an image of the U.S.-Mexico border. And for those of you that don't know this already, there is a wall already. And what we're seeing is the border and overlaid on top of the border, we're seeing a vision of what the border looks like as seen through computer vision systems that are used to detect motion, detect anomalies. You know, we're seeing the border as well through the systems that surveil it. Phenoma that's been going on for a while is ALPR, Automatic License Plate Tracking. These are systems that take pictures of every single car that drives by on a city street. Something that is able to autonomously read the number of that car and the database that the police or law enforcement have access to, or again, issue things like traffic citations based on that, all without human intervention. The same thing is starting to come online with police body cameras, which are now being outfitted with facial recognition technology to do something similar. One of the tools that we have in the studio is the ability to make portraits of what people look like as they are seen by facial recognition software. And we've been running these on portraits of revolutionaries and philosophers from the past. On the left is the great post-colonial philosopher Franz Fanon, as seen through facial recognition software. On the right is Simone Vile. This is also obviously happening in the commercial space. You go to a modern supermarket or autonomous systems identifying you, trying to understand when the last time you were there was how much money you spent. What are you looking at? What's your emotional state? What are you interested in? What are your intimate sensing systems looking at? What kind of food do we eat? Are we going to the gym? Are we in good health? How are we behaving? Are we drinking too much? Do we smoke cigarettes? What kind of objects are in our houses and what does that say about who we are? We're at a point now where Google or a Facebook or an Amazon literally knows more about me and my history than I know about myself. And what are some of the implications of that? How do we think through that? What do we see when we actually look through these kinds of sensing systems? Well, one thing that I think becomes very obvious when you spend some time with it is I think there's a kind of popular idea out there that technology is neutral, it's just how you use it. And I want to counter that or say there's no such thing as technology detached from how you use it. And so when you use it and when you deploy these kinds of systems any kind of sensing technology sees through the eyes of the forms of power that is designed to amplify the forms of power that is designed to exercise whether that is military power or law enforcement or commercial power, etc. I think that's one thing that you start to see. And this brings up a lot of concerns for me. I worry about what the future of these kind of planetary autonomous sensing systems are. I worry that they have a tendency to kind of reproduce the kinds of racism and patriarchy and inequality that have characterized so much of human history and also concerned that they represent enormous concentrations of power in very few places. I said at the beginning of the talk that one of the things I want out of art is things that help us see the historical moment that we live in. How do we learn to see the world? But there's something else that I want out of art as well. I want something that helps us see a world that we want to live in and if you want to see that world you have to ask yourself what do you want. And so I spend a lot of time looking at these technologies and asking myself how would I want them to be different? What world do I want to live in? I want to live in a world in which artificial intelligence has become decoupled from its military histories from its commercial histories from its law enforcement applications and so on and so forth. So I started building very irrational neural networks. Neural networks that instead of being able to analyze your face and detecting what emotion you might be in that look around at the world and see literature. In this case there's an AI that sees omens importance and this is an image that's synthesized of a comet, of a rainbow. This is an image that it's synthesized of a vampire. This is an AI that was trained to see monsters that have historically been allegories for capitalism. Histories of warfare or fantastic images. I want to think I want an Internet I want global telecommunication systems that are not the greatest instruments of mass surveillance in the history of the world. What would that look like? So I started building hardware, communications hardware for museums in the form of sculptures that create open Wi-Fi networks but instead of tracking all the data of all the people that connect to them, it does the exact opposite. It anonymizes the identities of people collected to the network and encrypts all the traffic so that nobody can see what people are doing when they're using the Internet in a museum. I want spaceflight that's decoupled from the histories of nuclear war and the military histories associated with it even the kind of colonial imaginations associated with it. So I started building a satellite. This is a project called Orbital Reflector that's due to launch this summer between July and August. We just got our official launch letter yesterday that's commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art and all it is is a satellite goes up into space. What it does is it deploys a giant mirror about 30 meters long, 100 feet. What that mirror does is reflect sunlight down to Earth to create a new star in the sky. That lasts about two months and then it burns up harmlessly. And so this question of what kind of world do we want to live in? Well, I want to live in a world that has more justice, more equality, and that has more beauty in it. And that is kind of why I try to do these preposterous things. Thank you guys so much for coming.