Courtesy: Altman Siegel Gallery and Metro PicturesĪnd yet, while it’s largely taken for granted that space has become a place for weapons and commercialization – beaming us our television shows, giving us a global phone network, putting military satellites into orbit – for millennia, space was primarily a blank slate for existential exploration, for human possibility.įor Plato, the stars and the planets ‘set limits to and stand guard over the numbers of time,’ as he wrote in the fourth century BCE. Trevor Paglen, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4 Build 4), 2013, mixed media. With US president Donald Trump’s Space Force – which would act as a sixth branch of the military – set to launch in 2020, space seems to be on its way to being even more militarized than ever before. Bush, before casting the sole ‘no’ vote on the United Nations’s Space Preservation Treaty, a proposed resolution to ban all weapons in space in 2006. Throughout the 2000s, the US ramped up its military might in space, pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 under then president George W. The US and the Soviet Union developed satellite-guided missiles to target one another from space during the Cold War. Since space travel was first made possible, it’s been weaponized. The Maryland-born MacArthur Fellow has a point. ‘The more time you spend looking at how outer space actually works,’ Paglen wrote in a Medium post, ‘the more you come to understand that space has become the domain of the world’s most powerful militaries – a platform for surveillance and warfare.’ At any given time there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of so-called ‘black spacecraft’ orbiting the globe: covert satellites used for a variety of purposes, including surveillance and the stealth navigation of nuclear weapons and drones. For years, artist Trevor Paglen went to his apartment’s rooftop nearly every evening in order to track and photograph secret satellites.
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