NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Keawaula, Hawaii, United States

Paglen received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his PhD in geography from Berkeley, an apt education for an artist whose main interest is tracking the surveillance state whose tendrils reach into every corner of our lives. In 2011, the Met acquired a photograph that the artist made of a reconniassance satellite passing over Yosemite's Half Dome, incisively tying together the settlement of the West in the 19th century with the settlement of the air in our own time.

For his most recent series of works, Paglen hunted down the coastal spots around the globe called "choke points" where NSA intelligence gatherers place their taps on converging underwater cables. Each work is a unique diptych comprised of an above ground view of the "choke point' location and a navigational chart of the same location, onto which he has collaged materials from what is called the "Snowden archive"--the cache of documents released by the whistleblower (Paglen was the cinematographer of "Citizen Four", the documentary about Snowden). This particular example has a nice circular quality in that here he shows the NSA data collection center, nestled on an Oahu coast, where Snowden worked--the originary site whose exposure made Paglen's expose possible.