Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies
By Trevor Paglen
Design by Raegan Kelly & Craig Dietrich
Editors' Introduction
In its year-end roundup for 2006, the New York Times declared “sousveillance” to be one of the key “ideas” of the year. Never mind that the list also includes “yodeling” “tushology” and “digital maoism,” when the NYT shows up with a six-pack under its arm, the party is probably nearly over anyway. Trevor Paglen didn’t invent the idea of reversing the gaze of the cultural panopticon, but he has been doing it with extraordinary virtuosity for nearly ten years. Legend has it that Paglen, who has been called the Fox Mulder of cultural geography, was personally instrumental in provoking the military to extend the perimeter around Area 51 by several miles in an attempt to thwart one of his counter-surveillance efforts, which he dubs “limit telephotography.” Basically, Paglen leads tours around the edges of the military industrial complex, and true to his training as a geographer, maps the contours and the surfaces that conceal as much as they give away. Even black-world operations, the government’s double-secret programs that take place largely in remote deserts and mountains, involve people and objects such as planes. And just as people and objects obey certain basic laws of physics (such as having mass and taking up space), they can be tracked using tools that are variously high and low tech – from high-power telephoto lenses to FAA flight-tracking data. Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies has it all. Fuzzy counter-surveillance photos taken from miles away sit side-by-side with crisply rendered map tracking data that shows the routes taken by planes with blocked tail numbers and no official destinations.
Editors' Introduction Continued
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Project Technologies
Development and data handling applications:
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
HTML with JavaScript
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
Open-source relational database
Extensible Markup Language
Open source image rendering library
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