Trevor Paglen
On the Imperial
Production of Nowhere
project overview When the United States exploded the first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, a massive nuclear war began in the American West. With the Manhattan project, the US government invented ways to conceal astronomical sums of money from congress and the public in order to develop secret weapons, secret cities, secret airplanes, and secret bases. As the U.S. became a “superpower”, swaths of land the size of small countries were appropriated and made invisible under restricted airspace and redacted documents. In some of these areas, the Earth is bombed to oblivion and transformed into radioactive poison. Other places, removed from maps and hidden under opaque veils of government secrecy, are used to develop and test continually-expanding squadrons of homicidal flying machines. To look into these spaces is to stare into a void – there is almost nothing to see but an absence. Information about these spaces and the ongoing war happening within them has to be inferred from the fragments that they leave in their vicinities. Intercepted military communications, sonic booms in empty-looking skies, and bizarre sicknesses on human bodies are some of the only records we have of these landscapes and the activities which occur within them. |
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