Upgrade! New York - Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere, with Trevor Paglen

Upgrade! New York at Eyebeam

Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere
with Trevor Paglen

Thursday October 4, 7:30 PM

Eyebeam, art and technology center
540 West 21st Street,
New York City, NY, 10011
www.eyebeam.org

Join us for a special Upgrade! with Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen presents his projects and collaborations, including his current Eyebeam commission. Joined by the Eyebeam Production Fellows, Jeff Crouse, Evan Harper, Geraldine Juarez and Chris Sugrue, his collaborators on his commissioned piece with Eyebeam, Paglen will detail the project and progress to date.

Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen takes us on a road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people: through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the "black world." Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from "non-existent" 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.
http://www.paglen.com/

Paglen and IAA are also presenting their collaborative work, Terminal Air, in Eyebeam's current exhibition Interference. The exhibition will be on view prior to The Upgrade!

Artists include: Forays | Angie Eng | Jill Magid | Carrie Dashow | Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg | Trevor Paglen | neuroTransmitter | Robert Ransick | Yury Gitman | Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena | IAA | Graffiti Research Lab | Caspar Stracke | Eyebeam R&D Lab | Michael Frumin | Jonah Peretti

Interference is the second of three exhibitions celebrating 10 years of Eyebeam support for artists experimenting with new technologies. Employing a diverse array of media and strategies, which includes data visualization, performance, community engagement and public intervention, the artists and collectives featured in Interference probe ideas of access and autonomy. From the very public, but deliberately obscured, satellite surveillance data recorded in Paglen and IAA’s work tracking CIA aircraft, to the intimacy of Magid’s collaboration with a local NYC police officer; from Forays’ engagement with local community gardeners, to GRL, Gomez de Llarena and Gitman’s tools for communication, the projects in Interference ask us to seriously consider concepts of communal space in an increasingly privatized public sphere.

–
Amanda McDonald Crowley
executive director

EYEBEAM
540 W. 21st Street
New York, NY 10011, USA
T +1 - 212.937.6580 x223
F +1 - 212.937.6582
[email protected]
www.eyebeam.org