Trevor Paglen, an American artist with a penchant for experimental geography, is heading to a TV near you. He's one of several artists featured on the "ART 21" series on PBS, a show dedicated to profiling art and artists of the 21st century.
Paglen is known for his work, "The Last Pictures," a curated collection of 100 images that was launched into space on EchoStar XVI, acting as a future relic for travelers of another place and time to find. As you can see in the video above, his fascination with materialism and culture-making -- on a possibly inter-galactic scale -- has not been diminished.
"It was a very strange time in the late 1950s/early 1960s, when people were putting things in space but that language of spacecraft hadn't really congealed yet," Paglen explains in the video above. "A lot of artists at that time were looking at them as aesthetic objects. Maybe they saw a world where we didn't have to kill ourselves with nuclear war. We didn't have to use technology to build a surveillance state. Maybe it was a different direction, and that moment is something that I'm very much trying to understand."
"ART21" is set to debut on October 24 on PBS. Over the next few weeks, we'll be previewing clips from the series, giving a sneak peek into the experiences of artists like Trevor Paglen, Graciela Iturbide, Wolfgang Laib and Joan Jonas. Stay tuned.
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