I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me
Apr 20th, 2008 by chriscooney
On April 7, Trever Paglen appeared on the Cobert Report to talk about his new book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me.
The interview with Steven Cobert just scratched the surface of Trever’s research into covert government operations and facilities. During the Vectors Fellowship Kim Christen and I attended at USC in 2005, Trever blew our minds with his presentation of images taken from the perimeter of secret government installations using limit telephotography. His photography and research ultimately became Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies a project that tracks the flight activity of the JANET fleet, a group of government owned airplanes who navigate:
a very peculiar kind of relational space indeed – a geography of secret projects, places, and people that military and defense-industry insiders refer to as the “black world.
What impressed me both when I met Trever and during his conversation with Cobert was that he refuses to take a stance that there is a vast conspiracy at work behind these symbols. Rather, he seems more interested in the details and bizarre behavior of the military culture that produces them.
