A report from the Berlin Transmediale art fair on the work of Trevor Paglen, who blurs the line between parapolitical research, art and paranoid anthropology – sounds quite amazing. He also has a book out on the symbolism of flight patches: I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Amazon USA and UK).
‘Paglen works at the border of art and research and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His artistic work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and other more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us.
‘Paglen then showed us pages from the Department of Defense Budget Fiscal Year 2008. The document is publicly available but presents some puzzling numbers. For example, a whopping $ 12.3 million is allocated to toilets which, the document states, must provide soldiers with equipment 2 enhance their efficiency and efficacy.”
Paglen showed more images from a documents of classified strategic RDT&E programs. Some projects with mysterious names such as “Pilot Fish”, “Retract Juniper,” “Chalk Coral”, etc. receive huge budget but, unlike the toilets do not present any justification. Sometimes the sum allocated to a project does not appear at all, leaving blank spots in the budget. The National Security Agency has mostly blanks in its budget.’
Over at We make art not money, via Ken Hollings.
