Books by Trevor Paglen
Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World
A geography scholar and artist recounts his research into ungoverned regions of the world where the military conducts some of its most clandestine operations, in an account that includes coverage of his investigation into a covert site in Nevada near where a construction worker was poisoned by toxic chemicals. 25,000 first printing.
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Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World
Welcome to a top-level clearance world that doesn't exist...Now with updated material for the paperback edition.
This is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a road trip through a shadow nation of state secrets, clandestine military bases, black sites, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies that make up what insiders call the "black world."
Here, geographer and provocateur Trevor Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out a covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar "black" budget, and interviews those who live on the edges of these blank spots.
Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, a secret prison in Kabul, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless-and delivers eye-opening details.
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Speculations (The future is ______) (TRIPLE CANOPY)
by Christian Parenti, Rachel Kushner, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, David Rieff, Ted Chiang, Trevor Paglen, Silvia Federici, Srikanth Reddy, Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, Jayce Clayton, Samuel Delany, N. Katherine Hayles, Josh Kline, Lynn Leeson, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeni Morozov, Hu+O+Ng Ngô
In summer 2013 Triple Canopy invited writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists and technologists to bet on the future: which future do you want to see realized? How precisely can you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? The answers were presented as Speculations ("The future is ______"), 50 days of lectures and discussions at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy's contribution to the exhibition EXPO 1: New York. This book, a lexicon of the central terms of Speculations, conveys the relationship between ideation and action and suggests viable approaches to interpreting and changing the world. Triple Canopy considers economic interventions ("guaranteed basic income"), political abstractions ("autonomy," "prometheanism"), figments of the imagination ("planetary colonization"), modes of expression ("science fiction") and useful neologisms ("hedge-fund utilitarians").
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Trevor Paglen: From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist
Commemorative coins, patches, mugs and other ephemera from the shadowy world of US military aviation and aerospace
In From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, multidisciplinary artist Trevor Paglen (born 1974) collaborates with Peter Merlin, a former NASA archivist, on this new artist’s book featuring a photographic inventory of objects from the aerospace historian’s archive of research culled from military bases such as Area 51.
Featuring images of challenge coins, patches and commemorative mugs from within these bases, as well as debris recovered from the surrounding crash sites, the book presents both a social and technological investigation into the US government’s secret aviation history from the atomic age to today's drone wreckage.
The symbols and texts featured on these objects that celebrate covert missions range in character from goofy to sinister, though their actual meaning may never be fully explained to the public. In addition to photographic images, the book includes an essay by Paglen as well as in-depth captions of the archive’s inventory, offering context for this history and addressing the present-day ramifications of these military advancements across the realms of communication, surveillance and warfare.
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The Last Pictures
Human civilizations' longest lasting artifacts are not the great Pyramids of Giza, nor the cave paintings at Lascaux, but the communications satellites that circle our planet. In a stationary orbit above the equator, the satellites that broadcast our TV signals, route our phone calls, and process our credit card transactions experience no atmospheric drag. Their inert hulls will continue to drift around Earth until the Sun expands into a red giant and engulfs them about 4.5 billion years from now.
The Last Pictures, co-published by Creative Time Books, is rooted in the premise that these communications satellites will ultimately become the cultural and material ruins of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, far outlasting anything else humans have created. Inspired in part by ancient cave paintings, nuclear waste warning signs, and Carl Sagan's Golden Records of the 1970s, artist/geographer and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Trevor Paglen has developed a collection of one hundred images that will be etched onto an ultra-archival, golden silicon disc. The disc, commissioned by Creative Time, will then be sent into orbit onboard the Echostar XVI satellite in September 2012, as both a time capsule and a message to the future.
The selection of 100 images, which are the centerpiece of the book, was influenced by four years of interviews with leading scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, and artists about the contradictions that characterize contemporary civilizations. Consequently, The Last Pictures engages some of the most profound questions of the human experience, provoking discourse about communication, deep time, and the economic, environmental, and social uncertainties that define our historical moment.
Copub: Creative Time Books
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I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World
Updated with New Information and Additional Patches
They’re on the shoulders of all military personnel: patches showing what a soldier’s unit does. But what if that’s top secret?
“A glimpse of [the Pentagon’s] dark world through a revealing lens—patches—the kind worn on military uniforms. . . The book offers not only clues into the nature of the secret programs, but also a glimpse of zealous male bonding among the presumed elite of the military-industrial complex. The patches often feel like fraternity pranks gone ballistic.”
—William Broad, The New York Times
I COULD TELL YOU. . . is a bestselling collection of more than seventy military patches representing secret government projects. Here author/photographer/investigator Trevor Paglen explores classified weapons projects and intelligence operations by scrutinizing their own imagery and jargon, disclosing new facts about important military units, which are here known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “Grim Reapers,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. The precisely photographed patches—worn by military personnel working on classified missions, such as those at the legendary Area 51—reveal much about a strange and eerie world about which little was previously known.
“A fresh approach to secret government.”
—Steven Aftergood, The Federation of American Scientists
“An impressive collection.”
—Justin Rood, ABC News
“A fascinating set of shoulder patches.”
—Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report
“I was fascinated... [Paglen] has assembled about 40 colorful patch insignia from secret, military ‘black’ programs that are hardly ever discussed in public. He has plenty of regalia from the real denizens of Area 51.”
—Alex Beam, The Boston Globe
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