Glacial Errata, No. 32

One: Cardinals

I was very glad to have caught Trevor Paglen’s show “Cardinals” at Pace Gallery in New York last Friday, literally minutes before it closed. The work consists of various format photographs, from polaroids and snapshots to large-scale C prints, of landscapes that feature a UFO. Paglen has said that some are fabricated and some are authentic; examining them closely it becomes clear which ones have a archetypal 50’s-era silver flying saucer and which are punctuated by nothing more than a black mark.

All are titled in the same format: “Near Dugway Proving Grounds,” “Near Waford Springs,” “Near Lichau Creek,” which offer a further sense of the inchoate proximity of the weird—something is nearby, but near to where?

The photographs are stunning, and hard to appreciate if you don’t see them in person, for many of them are quite large, with the putative UFOs just tiny blips in otherwise unforgiving and unconcerned landscapes.

“I often think about UFO photography as the paradigm of photography,” Paglen has said. “Something like, all photos are UFO photos.”

Two: I Could Tell You, But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me

I first came across Paglen’s work almost 20 years ago in Cabinet Magazine (The “Shadows” issue, perhaps the single issue of any periodical that crystallized for me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life), where he documented a collection of military patches for obscure, secret, and otherwise classified groups and operations. These were later collected in a book, I Could Tell You, But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me, a line in Latin taken from one of the patches, Si Ego Certiorem Faciam … Mihi Tu Delendus Eris. As Paglen notes, the odd phrasing in the passive voice allows the unknown creator of this patch to reference Eris, the Greek god of Chaos, and the Roman senator Cato’s famous phrase, Carthago delenda est (“Carthage must be destroyed”).

Later, in 2017, when my friend Jason Brown and I were traveling through the southwest desert researching my book The Unidentified, we stopped in the Little Ale’Inn, a diner, RV camp, and tourist trap on the edge of Area 51 that’s a haven for UFO aficionados. Behind the bar I recognized many of the patches from Paglen’s book.

Three: From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archeologist

Another of Paglen’s books that continues this theme of collecting archives of the hidden, obscure, and secret.

“In a sense,” he writes in the books introduction, “the study of material culture is a sort of time travel. Material culture combines nature and culture, present and past. Hundreds of millions of years from now, long after human civilizations have disappeared from the planet, a thin stratum in the earth’s crust will contain clues that something quite curious happened about 66 million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, the geologic moment that marks the end of the dinosaurs. The thin K-Pg boundary layer contains unusually high traces of iridium—fallout from the massive asteroid impact in present-day Chicxulub, Mexico, that contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs. A similarly distinct signal marks the geologic strata of our own time: an unusual concentration of cesium 137, whose origins can be pinpointed down to the minute: 5:29 a.m. local time, July 16, 1945. This, of course, marked the moment that the world’s first atomic bomb, code-named Trinity, detonated in the New Mexico desert.”

Four: The Last Pictures

For another project, Paglen assembled a group of photos that were micro-etched into an ultra-archival disc, encased in a gold-plated shell, and then attached to the satellite EchoStar XVI, which was launched from Kazakhstan in 2012. The satellite is designed to be active for 15 years, after which, Paglen explains, it will maneuver itself into “a ‘graveyard’ orbit where it will become a ghost-ship, carrying The Last Pictures towards the depths of time.”

Discussing The Last Pictures, Paglen comments “I started thinking about time differently. I thought about the many ways in which the future has already happened. If we look at things like nuclear waste—that has created a certain version of the future that has already happened, even though temporality hasn’t caught up to it yet. The same is true when you look at climate change. Humans have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere in ways that have long-term and somewhat predictable effects. That future already exists even though we haven’t caught up to it yet. You could make the same arguments about the past as well in the sense that the past is always being reconstituted and reconfigured by the people in the present. It’s also true that we are living in the past when we look at things like training data or the lingering of media.”

Five: The Monk by the Sea