Earthlings welcome: Paying a visit to the Little A'Le'inn, an eatery/shrine to flying saucers just down the road from Area 51 in Rachel, NV.
Monday Night 08.08.05 --Presentation/Discussion: Trevor Paglen
The Secret Bases: Exploring the Pentagon's "Black World"
Monday Night 08.08.05 @ 7:30 Pm
16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)
Open To All
we are happy to invite Trevor Paglen back to 16Beaver for a presentation of his latest research. We hope you will make it for what should be a really interesting evening.
The Secret Bases: Exploring the Pentagon's "Black World"The amount of money spent on secret Pentagon projects - the so-called "black budget" - has reached unprecedented levels in the past few years. This level of hidden military spending translates into a variety of extremely peculiar built environments and landscapes. From the popular phenomenon of "Area 51," to discreet locales like the Helendale Avionics Facility, the Southwest is littered with places where the military develops, tests, and operates technologies that "do not exist." Among industry insiders, these clandestine infrastructures and secret bases are collectively known as the "black world.""Spying on the Government" - An article from the SF Bay Guardian.
For geographers and cultural producers, hidden military landscapes pose bizarre visual and epistemic challenges and paradoxes. How might we see places whose very existence is a state secret? What are some empirical means that we can use to detect the presence of carefully constructed absences? What happens when the norms of visuality and intelligibility begin to collapse? What do these epistemic limit-cases look like? What do they sound like?
In order to pursue this project, I have developed some unorthodox methods to research and document traces of hidden military landscapes, movements, and economies. These techniques include "limit telephotography," symbology, ad-hoc participatory anthropology, amateur geospatial intelligence collection, plane-spotting, and military communications monitoring. In this presentation, I will demonstrate some of these unusual techniques and discuss some of the projects that have come out of these efforts.
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is writing a doctoral dissertation about the spatial aspects of military secrecy.
His projects deliberately blur the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched, ways to interpret the world around us.
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th / 5th fl.
New York, NY 10004
phone: 212.480.2093
for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
(SF Bay Guardian photo by Lori Spears)
No comments:
Post a Comment