[I’d never heard of artist (and author and geographer) Trevor Paglen until I was watching the NBC Nightly News on Monday evening, 24 November. Anchorman Lester Holt introduced a story about a huge sculpture Paglen planned to create and then launch into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on Sunday, 2 December, co-created with the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Orbital Reflector, a 30-meter-long (about 98 feet) mylar obelisk, will reflect the light of the sun and be visible from Earth. The first satellite that’s purely an artistic object, Orbital Reflector will circle our planet for about three months and then reenter Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate. I was so fascinated with this confluence of aesthetics and technology, art and space, that I looked up some other articles on the project. (There are many, as you might imagine.) Here are two, one from NBC News and the other from the PBS NewsHour. Following the NBC report, I’ve posted the promo blurb and link for the Nightly News report I watched. (There was no transcript for the broadcast, but the link includes a video of the report).
“ARTIST’S
ARTIFICIAL ‘STAR’ WILL TAKE PUBLIC ART TO NEW HEIGHTS”
by Denise Chow
[This report aired
on NBC News
on Wednesday morning, 22 August 2018.]
The
light-reflecting balloon will look like a star moving slowly across the night
sky.
In 2008, Trevor Paglen
picked up the phone and started calling around to see if he could drum up
support for his latest idea.
The Berlin-based artist
wanted to put into low-Earth orbit a big, shiny object that from the ground
below would look like a star moving slowly across the night sky. It would be a
work that interprets aerospace engineering as an art form, he said, a satellite
without military, commercial or scientific value.
Now, 10 years later,
Paglen is about to realize that dream.
In mid-November, a
brick-sized cubesat containing his “neo-minimalist sculpture” — an arrow-shaped
polyethylene balloon coated with highly reflective titanium dioxide — will go
into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California.
Once the cubesat is in a
stable orbit about 360 miles above Earth, the balloon — dubbed Orbital
Reflector — will be released; a carbon dioxide cartridge will inflate it to its
full 100-foot-long size, or about the dimensions of two school buses parked end
to end.
The artwork will circle
Earth once every 94 minutes, appearing about as bright as one of the stars in
the Big Dipper. “As it catches sunlight, it’ll reflect that down to Earth,”
Paglen said. “Within a day of launching, you should be able to see it.”
Orbital Reflector is
designed to remain in its orbital perch for three months. Eventually, Earth’s
gravity will tug its orbit so low that it hits the atmosphere and burns up
harmlessly.
Though the idea for
Orbital Reflector was his alone, Paglen had some help along the way. The
balloon was made by Global Western, a Colorado-based aerospace firm, and the
Nevada Museum of Art helped provide funding for the $1.3-million project.
The museum’s Kickstarter
campaign raised more than $76,000 last year, with the rest of the money coming
from various sponsors, according to museum spokesperson Amanda Horn.
“This is a romantic
gesture in the night sky — a satellite that exists purely as art,” Horn said. “It
enables us through the lens of art to imagine, even just for a moment, a
different future for spaceflight, to think of the past in a different way,
where spaceflight was driven by bigger questions like who are we, and where do
we come from?”
The museum plans to
create a website that people can use to track Orbital Reflector so they’ll know
where and when to look for it. Paglen said he will travel to museums around the
world to host “star parties,” adding that Orbital Reflector will reflect not
just light but humanity’s penchant for gazing at the heavens.
“This is something that
humans have done for tens of thousands of years,” Paglen said. “We look at the
sky as a way to try to see ourselves — whether that’s seeing ourselves in
constellations or whether that’s trying to see our own origins by looking at the
depths of space through something like the Hubble Space Telescope. I think that
the history of humans looking to the sky is a history of us looking at
ourselves and, for me, this project is a gesture in that direction.”
*
* * *
“SCULPTURE
DESTINED FOR SPACE SPARKS DEBATE AMONG ASTRONOMERS”
Artist Trevor Paglen
designed his “Orbital Reflector” to raise questions about what’s sent into
space and by whom. With around 1,700 spacecraft currently orbiting the earth
along with hundreds of millions of pieces of space debris, astronomers like
Jackie Faherty, who’s an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural
History, are skeptical about the sculpture’s impact on space and on their work.
NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, 24 November 2018
*
* * *
“IN
A WORLD FULL OF SURVEILLANCE, ARTIST TREVOR PAGLEN STARES BACK”
by
Jeffrey Brown
[Jeffrey Brown’s
interview was broadcast on the PBS NewsHour on Friday evening, 10 August 2018.]
When artist Trevor
Paglen looks up at the night sky, there’s beauty and wonder, but also a planet
completely transformed by humans into a “landscape of surveillance.” His new
exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Sites Unseen,” offers a new
way to look at very familiar landscapes. Jeffrey Brown reports on Paglen’s
latest obsession: how artificial intelligence is reshaping imagery.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Finally tonight: With heightened
attention being given to surveillance and spying, Jeffrey Brown takes a look at
an artist whose landscapes often contain more than meets the eye.
JEFFREY BROWN: What do you see when you look up at
the night sky? For Trevor Paglen, there’s beauty and wonder, but something
more.
TREVOR PAGLEN: I see a planet that has been completely transformed by the humans, and transformed in particular kinds of ways, looking at who is putting things in space, for what reason.
JEFFREY BROWN: Paglen is an artist showing us what he
calls a landscape of surveillance, satellites orbiting the planet. Military
installations off the grid. Cables under the sea.
Intelligence and
information gathering hidden in plain sight, like a tiny dot in a gorgeous
photo of the Nevada sky that turns out to be a drone.
His new exhibition at
the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington is called “Sites Unseen.”
TREVOR PAGLEN: What we see is mostly very familiar
landscapes, but we also see a lot of very unfamiliar landscapes that we don’t
recognize as such.
Learning how to see the
environments that we live in, learning how to see the moment in history we live
in. And I actually think that’s a lot harder to do than we imagine it.
JEFFREY BROWN: We’re seeing it, but you’re saying we’re
not seeing it.
TREVOR PAGLEN: That’s what I mean by “Sites Unseen.”
We’re seeing it, but we’re not recognizing it.
JEFFREY BROWN: Paglen combines elements of
photography, science, and investigative journalism. He has a Ph.D in geography,
as well as a master’s in art.
And his work, exhibited
in galleries and museums worldwide, won him a MacArthur Fellowship, the
so-called Genius Award, in 2017. He sees himself in a long line of landscape
artists, and sometimes makes direct connections to photographers such as Ansel
Adams, for example, in this Yosemite scene.
But, in Paglen’s image,
the movements of satellites show up in the sky overhead.
TREVOR PAGLEN: You’re having a conversation when you’re
an artist with all the people that are alive today, but you’re also having a
conversation with your ancestors. How did they see it in their moment in time?
How do we see it in our moment in time?
JEFFREY BROWN: And how much can we see? Paglen took
these photographs of military installations in the West from as many as 50
miles away, using telescopic lenses. He breaks no security or trespassing laws.
Heat waves create a distortion effect he likes.
TREVOR PAGLEN: You’re looking through so much heat
and so much haze, that the light itself is falling apart, the image itself is
falling apart. And, for me, that becomes a kind of metaphor.
You know, what do we
actually learn from looking at images? What do images tell us, and what do they
obscure?
And I want make images
that have that tension within them, that don’t obviously reveal themselves in
one way.
JEFFREY BROWN: Sometimes, the tension isn’t obvious
at all, like this seemingly prosaic Long Island beach scene.
TREVOR PAGLEN: The photograph is a little bit of a
trick, in the sense that there is no evidence of the thing I’m actually trying
to photograph in the image. You cannot see the thing.
JEFFREY BROWN: The thing is underwater. This is where
transatlantic fiberoptic cables come ashore.
Paglen and his
colleagues studied telecom maps and ocean currents, and learned to scuba dive
to take these photographs of what he calls the infrastructure of the Internet,
the information flow that can be swept up by surveillance efforts, and all out
of sight of the beachgoers.
Do you want these people
at the beach, who could be any of us, to know what’s going while they’re
enjoying their day at the beach?
TREVOR PAGLEN: Yes, yes, sure.
While they are enjoying
their day at the beach, I don’t really care what they think about. But I think
that, as a culture, yes, we should be paying attention to what’s going on. We
should be paying attention to the things that are shaping what the rest of our
lives are going to be like and what our children’s lives are going to be like.
JEFFREY BROWN: Paglen loves to collect the odd code
names and emblems attached to thousands of secret programs. They, too, become
part of his art.
He’s worked often with
investigative journalists. His footage of NSA bases was included in “Citizenfour,”
Laura Poitras’ documentary about Edward Snowden. But he doesn’t consider
himself an activist with a political agenda.
TREVOR PAGLEN: If I say, I think we should pay
attention to Google as an institution, and that we should really think about
whether or not we want to have that sort of power concentrated in a particular
company, corporations with that sort of influence, how do we want them to
exist, is that an activist proposition?
Not really, in the sense
that you’re not proposing something that we’re going to do about it. But
perhaps it’s activist, in the sense that you’re saying, this is something I
think should be on our kind of social agenda to look at.
JEFFREY BROWN: His latest obsession, how artificial
intelligence is reshaping the world of imagery, with machines increasingly
making those images to be read, decoded and used by other machines, including
facial recognition algorithms.
And Paglen has one more
out-of-this-world idea coming soon. He’s designed his own satellite, but one
unlike those he documents.
TREVOR PAGLEN: The idea is to build a satellite that
has no military, scientific, or commercial value. Can we build a satellite that
is a work of art?
JEFFREY BROWN: This orb-like sculpture in the
exhibition is an early model. The actual piece will be diamond-shaped, and
reflect sunlight back to Earth, moving through the sky like a new star.
You’re a guy who’s been
looking at all these things up in the sky.
TREVOR PAGLEN: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: You had a desire to put your own thing
there?
TREVOR PAGLEN: Yes. I mean . . .
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes?
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes?
TREVOR PAGLEN: No, I try to — when I look at
infrastructures, and I look at the kind of political stuff that’s built into
our environments, I try to imagine, what would the opposite of that be?
Could we imagine if
space was for art? What would that be? And then I’m kind of ridiculous enough
where like, OK, let’s get busy, let’s do that.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: The Orbital Reflector, a project with
the Nevada Museum of Art, is expected to be launched this fall on a SpaceX
rocket. It will be visible in the sky for several months before burning out.
For the PBS NewsHour, I’m
Jeffrey Brown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.
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