Petra Quilitz's List: mirror script

• Paglen: The Red Hats were a unit of test pilots whose job was to fly a squadron of Soviet MIGs, Russian aircraft. Since the 1960s, the United States has acquired, over time, a squadron of foreign aircraft — a secret squadron. They were based at Groom Lake in Nevada, and the pilots who flew these basically purloined MIGs called themselves the Red Hats, after the color red that’s associated with the Soviet Union. On their patch is a bear coming across the world, and the slogan is MORE WITH LESS, because they’re doing more work with less stuff — because they don’t have that many of these MIGs.

• Rumpus: It has six stars. What do those signify?
   

   

  Paglen: They signify 5+1, for Area 51, which is where they’re based.

• So what can we see here (in this photo)? I see a horizon with a lot of indistinct lights on it, and some mountains in the background. You shot this from a location 26 miles away from the installation…
   

   

  Paglen: On top of a mountain.

   

  Rumpus: So what can we really see here?
   

   

  Paglen: Nothing! (Laughs) And that’s one of the things that I like to do, photograph something even though there’s only so much that a photograph can tell you. That’s why I use the word limit in the name of the technique. Think about it: we’re seeing these places, but we’re also seeing the limit of seeing these places.
• What a lot of people don’t realize about the satellite imagery in general is that resolution is measured along two axes. There’s a linear resolution, which is what is the most detailed thing you can see in the photograph. But if you’re an intelligence analyst, or a spy — what’s actually more important is the temporal resolution. In other words, how quickly can you get the image? How close is the image in time to the thing that you want to see?

• Paglen: These two are airplanes; there’s another one here that is also an airplane. And this one here is a spy satellite whose name is KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL. The satellite looks like a white line interrupting the flow of stars through the sky — or disrupting it — and what that is, is the movement of this satellite over the course of the exposure. It’s a long exposure so it leaves a trail.
   

   

  I’ve been photographing spy satellites in the night sky for years now, and as kind of a subset of that body of work I’ve been photographing spy satellites over iconic landscapes in the West, in places that were first photographed by 19th century photographers like Muybridge or O’Sullivan or Watkins, who were often funded by the Department of War to conduct survey missions. A lot of these 19th century photographs we think of now as art landscape photography, at the time they called it reconnaissance missions.
• With any kind of project, (artists) have to decide what level of resolution we’re going to see something in. Like a satellite: if we look further back, we can see a broader swath of land with less detail, or we can look up close and see a lot of detail, but a smaller swath of land. So this is a very broad view.
• Investigative journalists are becoming so scarce; there’s increasingly less and less funding for people to do real time-consuming, painstaking forms of research and journalism. And let’s face it, when we look at the big news stories coming out of the world of state secrets in the last eight years or so, they were pretty much all broken by people who spent years, investigative journalists who spent years working on these stories. Things like NSA wiretapping, CIA secret prisons. And people who are in a position to do that work are becoming rarer and rarer, and there’s less and less funding for that kind of work.
• One thing I’ve come to see in researching this is that the state is internally very inconsistent, fractured and contradictory. And when you start to see that, you take out some of the mystique and some of the fear we have about organizations that are devoted to covert activities
• the failures of oversight (of) the secret state, historically. For example — the crucial example, in fact — is the Church and Pike hearings of the 1970s, which I talk about a little in the book. That was a moment in history where Congress really got angry and took on covert operations in a way that was unprecedented before that, and is unprecedented since that moment. This is where things like the Hughes-Ryan Act come out of, where Congressional committees which are ostensibly charged with oversight into covert activities come out of, this is (the reason for) laws requiring presidents to sign findings for covert activities. All of those come out of the Church and Pike hearings. But only a few years after a lot of that legislation was passed, we see the Reagan administration and the CIA under Bill Casey figuring out all kinds of ways to undermine and to get around all of those laws. Which culminates in the Iran-Contra affair. And the fact that nobody went to prison for Iran-Contra, nobody was really held accountable, is a hugely important moment in American history.

7 more annotations...

• Air Force,  United States,  Groom Lake,  Supreme Court,  Manhattan Project,  Special Forces,  The Other Night Sky,  Las Vegas,  White House,  Space Track,  Black Chamber,  Western Shoshone,  Nonfunding the Black World,  Guantánamo Bay,  Plains of Death,  Central America,  National Reconnaissance Office,  Nevada Test Site,  World War,  Salt Pit,  Niels Bohr,  Fiat Lux,  Justice Department,  Bird of Prey,  Department of Defense

• But what's most amazing, Muckli says, is her ability to see out of the left and right visual fields. Patients who have half of their cortex removed to treat epilepsy invariably lose half of their visual field. "They would only see half of the world; this is what's expected," he says.

                      

  That's because, each eye sends visual signals to two different halves of the brain via two distinct bundles of nerves. The nerves on the side of the eye nearest the nose are routed to the opposite side of the brain. The nerves nearest the temple, however, send information to the same side of the brain as the eye.

                      

  For example, the nose side of the left eye sends left visual field data to the right side of the brain; while the temple side of the left eye sends right visual field data to the left side of the brain.

                      

  For this reason, the right side of the brain processes our left visual field, and vice versa.