With origins in visual material he encountered as cinematographer for the 2014 Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, as well as deep thematic ties to the efforts of the whistleblowers and activists involved in that film, Paglen’s work here seeks to locate and describe the ostensibly invisible infrastructure of surveillance programs implemented by the NSA and other government organizations. In a format similar to his older images of gauzy, cloud-streaked skies whose titles reveal them to be populated by unseen drones, Paglen, who holds a Ph.D. in geography, captures the routes through which surveilled data flows. In NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Morro Bay, California, United States (all works 2015), serene coastal images show waves swelling along a beach under gray skies, surfers dotting the horizon (oddly reminiscent of Catherine Opie’s “Surfers” series); lest the viewer find the landscape calming, however, it is paired with annotated maps densely layered with information detailing in an appropriately nonlinear fashion the programs in place there. Having trained to scuba dive as part of his research, the artist also captures portraits of deep-sea cables tapped by the NSA. These rich, murky, and essentially abstract scenes—almost all shadow, the otherworldly structures emanating dark blues and greens—convey not so much a glimpse into the heretofore covert operations transpiring behind them as they do a sense of the fundamental opacity that characterizes the entire information enterprise.
Military ephemera—including small commemorative patches offering slogans like “Nothing is beyond our reach,” accompanied by an angry octopus wrapping its tentacles around the earth—illustrate another side of the aestheticization of surveillance culture, one that comes from inside. (As Paglen’s work offers few opportunities for humor, one hopes that the title of this series, “Symbology,” is indeed a dark joke somehow playing on the academic discipline Dan Brown invented in The Da Vinci Code.) The fruits of this research are interesting, but secondary to the work performed by his images, which seems at times to slip away from those engaging with his practice. Paglen’s heavily researched output is often informative, even journalistic, and it’s easy to like work that feels useful and urgent in this way, particularly for those disillusioned with the less grave recent offerings of the commercial art market. But Paglen is at his best and most complex when parsing the new ways of seeing that are enabled by the networks and entities he studies.
Take, for example, the video Eighty Nine Landscapes, a somber two-channel montage of landscapes bearing the traces, however subtle, of military surveillance interventions. In a nod to art historical tradition, the film moves through a collection of panoramic views familiar from the artist’s still photography: communications machinery sprouting from a cliff, a skyline punctured by an eerie array of white domes. Evidence of human population occasionally appears, as with the surfers in his coastal photographs, as specks on the horizon or lights emerging in the dark. At one point, Paglen offers a voyeuristic view through a kitchen window at night. Then the camera pulls back, and the window becomes one of many orange-tinted points of light on the face of a massive apartment building—a jarring move into abstraction, the image containing an overwhelming swell of human narrative transformed into data that we viewers aren’t yet equipped to comprehend.
A version of this article appears in the November 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
