Selected audio excerpts from Trevor Paglen's* lecture "Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere," Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 06/04/2008.
The Black World
"What is the Black World? A good place to start looking at that question is the Defense budget... [The Defense budget] contains blank spots, classified programs, special programs. You have entire agencies whose budget is a giant blank spot... One of the axioms of the kind of geography that I do is that money does not disappear into a vacuum but congeal in the surface of the Earth in a way it produces space."
Visuality of Secrecy
"The question I want to ask for the rest of the talk is one about visuality, and how do we see this world which we know exists but which is secret, as it were. I want to propose that in order to try to see this world, to develop a visual grammar of this black world, of this secret world, we have to become astronomers..."
Amateur Anthropology
"A lot of people that work in this secret world are regular people. They cannot talk to any outsider about what they are doing, including their families. There is a kind of intense cameraderie that tends to develop among this people. When they retire from these programs or they get out of this secret world, they start doing weird stuff, having alumni associations. They are having these conferences in hotels in which they don't even say why they are having then... And there is this incredible crisis of language that happens..."
Astrophotography
"The last contradiction I want to talk about is... about the fact that matter reflects light. I've been trying to photograph black sites for a long long time now. And a lot of them, particularly the ones in the U.S., have huge restricted areas around them, so you can't get anywhere near them. So I have quite literally used the tools of astronomy to try to take photographs that are many many miles away, that are essentially invisible to the naked eye..."