Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky / MATRIX 225

Dark Matter

In astrophysics, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter whose presence is known not through its own visibility, but only indirectly by its interaction with observable astronomical phenomena such as stars and galaxies. Scientists hypothesize that 90 to 95 percent of the universe is made up of this “missing” matter, its form unseeable, as it does not reflect light, and therefore unknowable. Trevor Paglen’s work as an artist, geographer, and writer concerns itself with the “missing” matter of the United States government’s covert military and intelligence activities, tracing the outlines of this shadowy world of so-called “black” operations by observing the rare moments when its means and methods come to light. The government sectors responsible for these activities don’t want us to see or know them, but as they interface so often with the physical world, the people, places, and things necessary to their operations surround us. This matter can be seen, offering the possibility to intuit some aspects of the vast dark matter of the black world.

After years of research into various aspects of secret government activities, Paglen knows what he is looking for. He parses the federal budget to discover through deduction the fiscal scope of unspecified black projects; he treks to the edges of secret military bases, primarily in the Southwest, and employs high-powered astrophotography techniques to image them from distances of over forty miles; he applies geospatial intelligence to uncover and document clandestine sites, such as the Salt Pit in Kabul, Afghanistan, location of questionable activities relative to CIA interrogation of assumed terrorists; he cross-references flight manifests and stakes out obscure air bases to visualize the network of “private” planes used to disappear suspects in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

In his latest project, Paglen turns to the sky to sketch the proliferation of secret reconnaissance satellites. Working with data compiled by amateur astronomers and hobbyist “satellite observers,” he tracks what he calls “the other night sky.” In the vastness of the cosmos, this physical manifestation of the black world hides in plain sight, visible even with the naked eye. Borrowing a language of scientific visualization of the cosmos, Paglen photographs barely perceptible traces of these vessels amidst familiar star fields. And with a gesture toward the popular presentation of scientific knowledge in sites such as space centers and natural history museums, a digitally animated projection installation covers a large-scale globe with representations of 189 currently orbiting satellites.

Paglen’s “other night sky” is like a shadow, sharing space with visualizations of the cosmos that evoke mythic pasts and space-bound futures. It reminds us of recent modifications to democratic society, in the form of government secrecy, that have taken us an uneasy distance from the foundations of democracy upon which this country was built. And so it echoes the early scientific work of empiricists such as Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, who hundreds of years ago looked to observable phenomena like the stars and planets in a quest for truth in the face of authoritarian institutions. Empiricism and democracy have shared roots in the Age of Enlightenment, linked through a foundation of universal truths. Paglen’s mapping of the black world of the U.S. government represents a similar effort, presenting the visible matter associated with secret programs in an effort to intuit truths about the invisible dark matter of the government’s clandestine activities. Like Galileo, Paglen looks upwards to the night sky, one of the oldest laboratories of rational thought, seeking answers about truth and democracy in the present moment.


Elizabeth Thomas
Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator

Produced with the support of Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York. Special funding for this exhibition is provided by Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan.

The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis.

Additional donors to the MATRIX Program include the UAM Council MATRIX Endowment, Jane and Jeffrey Green, Joachim and Nancy Bechtle, Rena Bransten, Maryellen and Frank Herringer, Noel and Penny Nellis, James Pick and Rosalyn Laudati, Barclay and Sharon Simpson, Roselyne C. Swig, Paul L. Wattis III, Penelope Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser, Paul Rickert, Iris Shimada, and other generous donors.