Artist Summary - Trevor Paglen

The guest speaker I chose to see was Trevor Paglen.  The auditorium was filled to about 75% capacity for the lecture.  Paglen had a unique method of blending social activism, research, and art.  The majority of his presentation was about the 'black' budget of the American government's fiscal budget.  The black budget refers to the funding and spending of money by the government which is not officially on the the record.  This is done to hide secret projects and covert activity.  Following the money trail and the discrepancies in the itemized budget, Paglen was able to uncover many operations.  One of his projects included locating secret military bases in the United States.  He created a virtual map with all their locations and documented them through photographs.  Paglen will get as close to he can to a base before security stops him.  Then he will take photographs of them, sometimes from as far as 20 miles away.   Also, he has also been able to deduce information about secret military aircraft in the testing phases.  They actually give patches to the military people working on these projects, as if they were any other normal mission.  Often hidden in the patches are symbolic clues as to what the project is about.  For example, one patch had an images of a sword, yet the sword's handle was a depiction of the experimental craft itself.  Paglen documented these patches in a book.  Lastly in the presentation, he described how he was able to track down CIA torture rendition flights by researching FAA flight logs.  These flights were often hidden by CIA front companies posing as an private contractor airline services.  Paglen would track down the addresses of these listed companies and in one instance, was led to a divorce attorney's office who would not answer any question about the information.  He is the author of three books, Torture Taxi, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, and Blank Spots on the Map:  The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World.