View Source: colloquium / Trevor Paglen

!The Secret Bases: Exploring the Pentagon's "Black World"

Over the last several years Pentagon spending on secret projects  has reached unprecedented levels. 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 nondescript locales like the Helendale Avionics Facility,  the Southwest is littered with places where the military develops,  tests, and operates technologies that "do not exist." Defense  industry insiders refer to this assemblage of clandestine  infrastructures, secret bases, and state capacities as the "black  world" (and yes, they really do talk like that).

For geographers and cultural producers, these 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.

!Bio
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 working a dissertation/book about the spatial aspects of military secrecy. His work involves deliberately blurring 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.

http://www.paglen.com
View Source: colloquium / Trevor Paglen

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