Paglen - The last pictures

THELAST PICTURES

TREVOR PAGLEN

Creative TimeBooks NewYork
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIAPRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished universitypresses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancingscholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activitiesare supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions fromindividuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Creative Time Books is the publishing arm of Creative Time, Inc., a publicarts organization that has been commissioning adventurous public art in New YorkCity and beyond since 1972.

Creative Time Books

59 East 4th Street, 6th floor

New York, NY 10003

www.creativetime.org

2012 by Trevor Paglen

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paglen, Trevor.

The last pictures / Trevor Paglen, Creative Time, New York.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-520-27500-3 (alk. paper)

1. Paglen, TrevorThemes, motives. 2. Interstellar communication. I.Creative Time, Inc. II. Title.

N6537.P22A4 2012

709.2dc232012017150

e-ISBN: 9780520954298

Designer: Lia Tjandra

Compositor: BookMatters

Contents

Echostar XVI

Artifact onboard EchoStar XVI

Foreword

When Trevor Paglen approached Creative Time with his dream of creating an artwork destined for the geosynchronous orbit, we jumped at the opportunity. For forty years, Creative Time has been presenting artists dream projects in the public realm. For the past dozen years, our own dreams have included commissioning a major public art project in outer space. Like Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise who famously declared, Space: the final frontierwe were seduced by Paglens vision of attaching a time capsule to the side of a satellite heading to space. Creative Time is known for innovating artistic practice and adventuring into unknown territory. Certainly space represents what is perhaps the most unknown and mysterious place of all. But even more important than our excitement for space is the enduring purpose of this artwork in raising essential questions about the very colonialist desire that space has so often represented. After four years in development, Trevor Paglen has created The Last Pictures, a subtle and deeply thoughtful project to stir the collective imagination.

As much as this project was an opportunity for Creative Time to grow its programming beyond New York and cities around the world, it is an important opportunity for Trevor Paglen to push his artistic practice into new realms. Trevor is known for his stunning photographs that make visible the invisible. Using a lens for photographing distant stars and turning it horizontally across the land, he has revealed clandestine landscapes of the United States Defense Department. Turning that camera lens up toward the night sky, he has focused on the distant orbits of communications and spy satellites. Suddenly the earth and the sky above are filled not just with the mysteries and magic of nature, but also with the complex interventions of humankind. His inquiries continue anew with The Last Pictures, as Paglen inverts his formula by literally situating photographs hes already taken into new photos. Here the geography is that of the Clarke Belt, a geostationary orbit (GSO) teeming with thousands of spacecraft whose job it is to orbit the earth and broadcast television signals, route our telephone calls, and process credit card transactions. By dint of the profound stability of this orbit, these objects will outlive human civilization by billions of yearslasting longer than multicelled organisms have been on earth. It is a timescale difficult to imagine. If our oldest cave paintings are thirty-five thousand years old, what can we make of these series of representations circling the earth, eons from now, as an ancient representation of what was once our present?

The Last Pictures can be seen in the space tradition of fiction writerand Trevor Paglen influenceStanisaw Lem. In the Russian tradition of cosmonaut literature, space is often a psychological arena that reveals more about societyits desires, frustrations, navet, and vanitythan about extraterrestrial life. Expanding on this lens, Paglen took up other creative confrontations with notions of deep time, from Carl Sagan and companys Golden Records attached to the unmanned space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, to an ongoing project to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to denizens of the far future. To consider the possibility of communicating across space and time, Paglen set out to interview scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, archaeologists, mathematicians, and artists about the conflicts of modern society. He conducted a graduate seminar, with students researching images and debating the possibilitiesand impossibilitiesof communicating who and what we are today. Paglen participated in a residency at MITs List Visual Arts Center and Visiting Artists program, where scientists worked with him on the production of these images in an archival format that would last millions of years. Energies were focused on solving just how we would actually launch the artwork into outer space. Calls and emails went out daily to satellite companies, launch brokers, scientists, and telecommunication companies. The task was not simple, but we were blessed to secure the partnership of EchoStar Corporation in November 2011.

Attached to the EchoStar XVI satellite is a golden disk approximately five inches in diameter containing a silicon wafer etched with one hundred images that form the core of this book and of the project itself. Paglen selected these images for their specificity, yet the intention of many of the images may not be self-evident. From an electron microscopic photograph of a Martian meteorite to the compelling Family of Man photograph of Yvonne Chevalliers 1952 trial, many of these images are opaque until their stories are told. And yet, collectively, The Last Pictures retain both a poetic and, dare we say, prophetic value. They are warnings. Their composition enacts a paradox worthy of civilizations epitaph, one that desperately communicates to the future the dangers of a highly capable and creative society unchecked.

With a project as ambitious as this, there are many people to thank. First and foremost, we want to thank our partners at EchoStar Corporation, Dish Network, The MIT List Visual Arts Center and Visiting Artists program, UC Press, and the Creative Time staff, volunteers, and researchers (see Acknowledgments). Most of all, it is an honor to have worked with Trevor Paglen. It is not often that one has the opportunity to send an artwork to space, and it is even more rare to meet someone with the will and courage to imagine and carry out a project as thoughtful and poetic as The Last Pictures.

Anne Pasternak
President and Artistic Director, Creative Time

Nato Thompson
Chief Curator, Creative Time