Oct 21, 2007
This week: Marc
and Brian talk to Trevor Paglen.
"Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer
working out of the Department of Geography at the University of
California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the
lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even
more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet
meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His
most recent projects involve close examinations of state secrecy,
the California prison system, and the CIA’s practice of
“extraordinary rendition.?
Paglen’s visual work has been shown in galleries and museums
including MASSMOCA (2006), the Warhol Museum (2007), Diverse Works
(2005), in journals and magazines from Wired to The
New York Review of Books, and at numerous other arts venues,
universities, conferences, and public spaces. He has had one-person
shows at Deadtech (2001), the LAB (2005), and Bellwether Gallery
(2006).
Paglen’s first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s
Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville
House, 2006) was the first book to systematically describe the
CIA’s “extraordinary rendition? program. His second book, I
Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me
(Melville House, 2007) an examination of the visual culture of
“black? military programs, will be published in November
2007. He is currently completing his third book, entitled
Blank Spots on a Map,
which will be
published by Dutton/NAL/Penguin in late 2008/early 2009.
Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, the
LEF Foundation, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. In
2005, he was a Vectors Journal Fellow at the University of Southern
California.
Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently completing a PhD in the
Department of Geography at the University of California at
Berkeley."
NEXT: Terri and Serena talk to Pate Conaway.
"Pate Conaway is an interdisciplinary artist fromChicago,
Illinois. Conaway sees the act of art-making as a performance
in itself. Conaway has produced art in gallery situations,
including during a five-week stint at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago where he knitted a pair of nine-foot-long
mittens. The artist, whose background is in performance and
paper arts, continues to work in sculpture, installation, and
interactive performance. Now learning to sew, Conaway is
fascinated by the idea of applying garment construction techniques
to bookbinding. Pate Conaway is a graduate of Chicago's Second City
Training Center and received his MFA from Columbia College,
Chicago. He has exhibited extensively in the mid-west and his
work can be found in the Artist Book Collection at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago."
AND Mike B. has a rant to offer.