Message In A Bottle

Someone you've never heard of may be responsible for an alien race's concept of humanity.

In November 2012, a silicon disc containing one hundred photographs representing life on Earth was affixed to the EchoStar XVI communications satellite and then launched into space on a Russian Proton-M rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome.

Trevor Paglen is the man who selected those photographs. Paglen holds a masters degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from Berkeley. He is a believer in "the deep state."

The photographs were culled from a project called "The Last Pictures," and were a response to the Golden Records that Carl Sagan attached to NASA's Voyager probes in 1977. Those discs are a time capsule that Sagan described as a note in a bottle cast into the ocean of space. The phonograph records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

Sagan's famous message contained no references to the uglier side of humanity, like disease, conflict, and social control. Trevor Paglen's does.

The communications platform carrying "The Last Pictures" in a geostationary orbit 36,000 miles above the Earth could theoretically last for a billion years.

Film director and author, Werner Herzog, who had a chance to preview the pictures prior to their launch, called the photographic choices "a low blow" to human civilization.

The "deep state" that Paglen refers to consists of the security and intelligence apparati of the United States, and the satellites and technology available to such entities as the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

Paglen's perspective has a military background. His father is a doctor in the Air Force, and Paglen grew up on military bases all over the world. He has an easy rapport with military personnel, which helps him gain access to various channels of information. Paglen says, "They’re just other people. I actually have a deep empathy for military culture, for how that works."

Motherboard (http://motherboard.vice.com/en_us) sat down with Paglen for an insightful interview.

Motherboard asked Paglen how he got interested in chronicling the secret government. Paglen responds:

I'm always paying attention to politics, and I was doing a lot of work around prisons in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, just trying to understand how prisons work. And very quickly after 9/11 it became obvious that there was a secret global prison system that was being set up. I started thinking about that, and I just saw a lot of the same dynamics that I had seen in the prison system, in terms of how this war on terrorism was being put together. 

Another thing I was looking at around prisons was the question of secrecy. There was kind of a ban on media at prisons. You just couldn’t learn very much about what was going on in there, and I could see the amount of abuse that that secrecy led to.

Motherboard asks Paglen to expound upon his ideas on state secrecy:

Yeah, absolutely. Secrecy has very little to do with what you get to know and what you don’t get to know. Secrecy is very much a set of executive powers. Secrecy for me, it's much more a question about what is the legitimate function of the state. The Obama administration with regards to secrecy is like the Bush administration on steroids. I mean they are much more brutal about how they enforce this stuff. The Obama administration has revived the Espionage Act and has tried to prosecute more people than all previous administrations combined. 

There are many, many facets to how this question of secrecy works. Economic, cultural, political — and the way that I think about it is very much that of two states. There's a state that is, you know, the Department of Agriculture or whatever, Farm Bills and Education Bills, and that sort of thing, where you sort of know what's going on. But there's another state within the state that has it's own rules. I think about it almost like the deep state. The part of the state which is not democratic at all.

How does the state prevent certain programs from having democratic or judicial oversight?

We know that data is being collected, it's being queried. We don’t know what's being done with it, but we know it's there. But to me secrecy is more about those kinds of programs being put in place, and being declared off limits from external oversight. It's about creating a state that is within the state and that is immune from external oversight.

Motherboard then asks about the technology available to previous regimes and those of today:

There simply did not exist the kinds of technologies that we have now in terms of surveillance powers. If you look at the great surveillance state of the Cold War era, the Stasi in East Germany, what the NSA is able to do now, with their data mining and surveillance program, is just orders of magnitude more that you could have ever dreamed up. And so there's a technological aspect to that. Of course, there's a political aspect to that as well.

Paglen recalls the story of a friend who conducted an experiment well before the explosion of social networking:

It's very funny — a friend of mine is an artist named Hassan Elahi, and a long time ago, around 2003, 2004, he built a website where he would upload all his bank account statements, every meal he had, every shit he took, just everything he did, he uploaded on the web, and all in real time. And we all thought, this guy is nuts. We thought this is the craziest project. But now all of us do this all the time. 

Paglen goes on to address his concerns about law enforcement using these technologies to track people and compile digital files on people more comprehensive than the people themselves have.

And it's not just the state. One of the things that I question: okay, so lets say that I have a picture of you on wherever it may be, on Facebook. The question is, in ten years from now, can that change your insurance premiums? The thing is, it's these very refined data that really control our economic interactions with society. There's a question of state surveillance, but in most people's lives in the near to midterm future, that's the sort of thing that's really going to effect a lot of people's lives.

I think that one difference is the marketplace and the state have become much more indistinguishable from one another than at any point in post-war American history. It's not a new thing in kind, but it's definitely a lot hotter, if you want to put it that way.

I think we know exactly what to expect from them. They are going to develop a very elaborate profile of you and that profile is going to be sold to whomever wants it, for cheap. The things that go on inside companies are also a matter of secrecy, and those decisions impact us in a big way. It's related to the question of, at what point does something surpass our ability to comprehend the way it works?

How did you select the pictures that may very well outlive the human race?

I think that was the hardest part from an artistic standpoint, or from a philosophical standpoint. A lot of them emerged out of a long process of interviewing some of the smartest people I could find and kind of asking them these ridiculous questions about what images should be for the future. And so those conversations I had with scientists and philosophers and other artists and anthropologists were kind of just thinking through this question.

On one hand, it’s a deeply ridiculous idea: to create images and then hope that somebody in a billion years is going to find them and it's going to tell them about the people. I mean, it's absurd. But at the same time I knew that if you're going to do it, you have to do it in an ethical way, because what gives you the right to do it? You have an enormous obligation to other people to have really thought through what these things are going to be, even if it's ridiculous. Because I think people care about how they are going to be represented. You can create this weird kind of record, and you have to do it in a way that is empathetic to the fact that people are invested in this thing.

I think about it much more in a poetic way. I didn’t want to create something that was aesthetically like National Geographic. There's a kind of look to that kind of documentary photography that I actually didn’t want in the project.

Motherboard asks, what does the future hold?

We don’t think about the future. Just what does a culture look like when its given up on a future? I think that there was a historical moment where we thought about the future a lot more than we do now. I mean you see that in all kinds of ways in politics all over the place, in terms of what kinds of investments you make in a future. And I think we invest less in the future. And I mean culturally in the US, maybe there is no future. Maybe it's just me, but in terms of denying global warming, for instance, there is a way in which our culture has turned its back on the future. And for me "The Last Pictures" is partly about trying to come to terms with that.

And finally, what will be done with all this data?

Let's pretend everything that you do and everything that you viewed is in a database controlled by the state somewhere. Now, if I have access I can retroactively watch your whole life. Whatever story I want about you I practically have evidence for that. Let's say that I want to pick you up tomorrow. Now in everybody’s life, there's a way of editing any moment you want, and to me that’s very terrifying in terms of these massive data collection and detention programs. And you know on the other side, the flip side of this question of corporate power, that question of, what your insurance premium is going to be. What picture do I want to paint of you to justify what I want?

So in other words, you imagine a more mundane creepiness.

Creepiness yeah, but also, your rights. So what rights do you have, what claims do you have to participate in society?

Creepy, indeed.

[For more information visit: http://creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures/the-pictures/]