Clockshop | Table Talk | Trevor Paglen

Table Talk #1 "The Heavens Above" with Trevor Paglen Friday October 26th, 8 pm Clearwater Studios, 2806 Clearwater Street, LA, CA 9003 http://www.clockshop.org/tabletalk.php Table talk is a semi-regular program involving food and conversation with cultural practioners—artists, writers, and civic leaders—who present projects, research, and ideas both finished and in incubation. Table Talk is hosted by Clockshop, a non-profit organization in Los Angeles. RSVP here: http://www.clockshop.org/tabletalk.php A $15 donation is suggested Trevor Paglen will present work from his most current project, "The Heavens Above", a series of meditations on the night sky, the sublime, classical empiricism, and democracy. Paglen explores these questions through narratives, photographs, and observations of 187 American reconnaissance satellites that he has been tracking using observational data from a global network of amateur "satellite observers." For this Table Talk event, Paglen will tell the story of AFP-731, a "stealth" satellite deployed from the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1990. Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. Paglen's visual work has been shown in galleries and museums including MASSMOCA (2006), the Warhol Museum (2007), Diverse Works (2005), in journals and magazines from Wired to The New York Review of Books. Paglen's first book, 'Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights' (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006) was the first book to systematically describe the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. His second book, 'I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me' (Melville House, 2007) an examination of the visual culture of "black" military programs, will be published in November 2007. He is currently completing his third book, entitled 'Blank Spots on a Map', which will be published by Dutton/NAL/Penguin in late 2008/early 2009. Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. http://www.paglen.com Julia Meltzer