This, perhaps, is a theme running through all of Paglen's work: Not a suggestion to fundamentally change how society works, but an invitation to be skeptical of how we go forward."There's no natural reason why that had to be the case. The Autonomy Cube is a project that's basically trying to say, look, we don't have to take for granted that this is the way the internet works. It's perfectly possible to build a version of the internet that is anonymous that you can use without being tracked, that gives you all the benefits of being able to access the wealth of humans' collective knowledge—but doesn't at the same time create incredibly powerful tools of state and corporate surveillance."
What's next for Paglen is a continuation of another one of his fascinations: Space junk. He's planning projects for 2018 that again question our biggest monoliths. One of them is a satellite with no real purpose. "People sometimes get really mad when I say I want to build a satellite that's just an aesthetic object," he said. "Like, it doesn't do anything. That's offensive to people sometimes." He is, in his words, cranky about space.He's also struggling in a new way with his own place in the world. "My job as an artist has been to try to focus attention, or say 'let's look at this,'" Paglen said. He's always trying to create that visual vocabulary on which to hinge the rest, whether it's a CIA black site or an anonymous network. But with new crises making headlines daily, and more and more issues competing for our attention, that task has become harder than ever."Traditionally, I've done stuff that's very political in terms of the things I'm looking at but can be subtle, in terms of the propositions that I've making aesthetically," Paglen said. "That subtlety doesn't feel like it has much bite in the current political environment."Whether humans should sent military surveillance to space or make machines that watch us at all times is beside the point for Paglen. His art is presented as a series of questions, or as he calls it, "a means by which you could imagine something that's counter to your common sense."Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter ."People sometimes get really mad when I say I want to build a satellite that's just an aesthetic object."