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Blank Spots on the Map, by Trevor Paglen

Lecture by Dr. Trevor Paglen

Date and time: Monday, March 1st at 8pm
Venue: Russell House

“Blank Spots on the Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible”

Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen takes us on a road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, on covert military bases, and more, guiding us through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from “nonexistent” Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home. Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.

Dr. Paglen is an experimental geographer, writer and artist whose work blurs the conventionally understood lines between social science, art and journalism, showing other ways to interpret the world. His visual and written work focuses on national security, military imagery, and practices of warfare. Dr. Paglen is author of Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009), I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (2007), and Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, co-authority with A.C. Thompson (2006). His visual work has been exhibited in Berlin, Pittsburgh, Taipei, San Francisco, Istanbul, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He received a BA from Berkeley, a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Geography from Berkeley.

Tags: geography, politics, talks