Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Forging a hybrid practice between contemporary art, social science, and investigative journalism, his work in “experimental lecture,” installation, photography, sound, and video has shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), U.C. San Diego (2004), the California College of the Arts (2002), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He is a contributing editor to the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, directs the Center for Experimental Geography at U.C. Berkeley, and develops tactical media projects with the prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Sounds of drums echo off the horizon. Crickets strike a fleeting dissonant chord in their delicate overture to the decaying bodies slumbering under the moist earth. Train bells glow red and begin to ring... something shuffles through the tall grass. I lower my antenna and pack my equipment into a muddy satchel. Tick, tick, tick, tick...
I am a geographer, aesthetician, and low-intensity insurrectionist. Specializing in urban reconnaissance and aesthetic booby-traps, my work is an expedition into the seething rainforest of everyday space: a decodable, but delicate and frangible constellation of living and breathing processes. Here there be tygers. Excavating the unclean and profane materials of conceived and lived environments - the noises, smells, and refuse - my task is to uncover and disrupt hidden forces, specters, ideologies, and encampments. Research and data gathering enjoy an uncongealed relationship to covert action and cultural monkeywrenching.
As a serious social researcher, I am interested in proposing new and unlikely models
with which to describe the spaces that we inhabit. As an aesthetic interventionist, my interferences of normative spatial practices create situations conducive to pedagogy, counterproduction, and fleeting subversion.
Trevor Paglen's Homepage
Tactics Without Tears
Exploring Secret Bases
Strategic Visuality
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