The artist who maps the twilight world of the surveillance agencies

It was a strange stage that Trevor Paglen took to, standing against a cartoon forest backdrop in a faux Gothic meeting room that was once a masonic lodge, looking out over a sea of attentive faces, gilded chairs and a plush, red carpet.

Paglen, a visual artist, is using this setting to preach about the power of the image to manipulate, to distort but also to reveal. “Images jump off the page and scramble our brains. They tell us to be afraid, that we are illegitimate, not perfect,” he says of the filtered, processed, post-production perfect images that saturate us in advertising and messaging. Paglen’s work is about subverting what has become the self-selecting, saccharin-distorted norm of the digital image.

Paglen’s mission is to map the surveillance world, post-Snowden. Much of his artwork – and the work that led him to this odd assembly where he is being presented with the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation – is concerned with making the invisible visible, to expose the secret. “I want to help develop a visual and cultural vocabulary around surveillance. It’s difficult to talk about something that is so abstract and when we imagine these agencies we think of them as very separate from other civic institutions.”

He argues that state surveillance operations should have processes and policies as available and transparent as public libraries, over which we have a far greater confidence in our understanding of the relationship between the agency and the citizen. “We don’t have any ownership over the intelligence community.”

Last November he hired a helicopter and took some stark, aerial shots at night of the US National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland, the National Reconnaissance Office in Virginia and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Virginia. These agencies, which respectively lead national security, run spy satellites and manage mapping intelligence, had a combined budget request of more than $25bn in 2013. Publishing on Creative Time and on the Intercept, co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, Paglen also released the pictures under a creative commons licence and fittingly made the pictures freely available and shareable on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. The images are high contrast, floodlight offices, car parks and walkways eerily absent, as if the building is defying the audacity of the photograph by refusing to give up any sign of human life.

An earlier series of images on drones is equally insistent, a swath of Turneresque cloudscapes where, were it not for titles such as Reaper Drone, the subject would be lost. But then look closely and a speck of drone is visible between clouds. Paglen’s shots of almost absentee drones, of which the physical versions are several feet long, create something out of nothing, a sinister silent, invisible presence made visible. These agencies, he says, rely, on the “organising logic” of invisibility and secrecy despite a real and significant presence in the real world.

Other pieces have visualised the routes of unmarked planes and front companies used for forced rendition, carrying suspected terrorists to secret US prisons. Paglen examined flying patterns for planes permitted to land at US air bases – including premier executive transport services” – and mapped out flights that recorded destinations including Kabul and Guantánamo Bay.

“The world is constantly changing and I feel like my job is to try to see how it is changing,” he says. “Traditionally images have functioned as representations of something in the world, but we are quickly approaching the point where vast majority of images are produced for other machines and no human being will ever see them. It’s an operational regime of images.”

Paglen’s work is confrontational, risky and extremely powerful. As well as surveillance, the domestic technology on which many of us have developed individual and corporate dependencies is also shapeless and intangible, adding to the empowerment of those companies over us and contributing to our own disempowerment. What Paglen enables with his visual vocabulary of surveillance is a way to make surveillance systems and technologies relatable, giving them a representation that we can understand and, eventually, become familiar with.

In that odd, bustling hall in San Francisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation celebrated mischief and imagination and dissent and nearly 25 years of challenging the seeping persistence of the techno-industrial complex that dominates the city and increasingly the world.

The best artists help to reflect, record and interrogate the world around us and Paglen is interpreting some of the most profound cultural, political issues that we have had to deal with.

“Images,” Paglen concluded, “can make realities out of people and struggles, the reality we give them. Images really matter. Images have their finger on the trigger.”