Anything humans can do in space, robots can do better.
When we look up into the starry night sky, we tend to see reflections of ourselves.
I can't imagine anything more beautiful on this planet than looking up at the stars and seeing a kind of artificial star moving through the night sky.
I think of AI itself as a monster of capitalism.
We imagine going to the moon and planting a flag, going to an asteroid and mining, going to Mars and setting up a colony. And I think that expansionist mentality is very self-destructive, especially given the kind of precarious relationship we now have to the ecosystem here on Earth, because it allows us to imagine that Earth is disposable.
I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective.
Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centres; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings. Surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them.
Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.
In the late 19th century, Russian Cosmists such as Nikolai Fyodorov believed we need to go to space to collect all the particles of all the people who had ever lived. Cosmism says going into space is going into the past.
We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state.
I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored.
Injustice drives me crazy!
People like to say that my work is about making the invisible visible, but that's a misunderstanding. It's about showing what invisibility looks like.
The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the U.S.' 'other' space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992.
We know that, immediately after 9/11, the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly, there is no paper trail.
The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.
Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world.
Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.
If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America's vast intelligence infrastructure.
We humans have always looked to the sky as a sounding board for asking big questions about ourselves: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
