Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world's information goes through little tubes under the ocean. Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.
Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.
I really don't think art is good at answering questions. It's much better at posing questions - and even better at simply asking people to open their eyes.
I wanted to make an artwork that really underlined the contradiction between how machines see and how humans see. Because music is so affective and is just as corporeal as it is cerebral, I thought coupling a music performance with machine vision adds up to something that work on an emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual level.
Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.
What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?
It's not okay for me to behave as if I'm cynical about the future. Even if I am.
I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.
Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.
American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.
Seeing various aspects of the secret state and surveillance state echoes a long tradition in art of looking at the sublime.
I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.
For me, there's something very romantic about going and looking at the stars and trying to photograph spy satellites.
One of the kinds of things I'm consistently interested in is what the border between the seen and not seen is and the border between being able to perceive something and not perceive it.
For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.
One project I am pretty excited about is 'Autonomy Cube.' These are basically minimalist sculptures that create a free and open Wi-Fi network wherever you install them, and they are routed over Tor, which basically anonymizes the traffic of everybody using it.
Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible.
When you look at the number of satellites, what they're doing and what they represent, it is really a vision of trying to have the world in your clutches.
Every person who went into the space industry did so because they looked up at the sky and were fascinated by it - not because they wanted to make a military or commercial object.
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