Visible Is the New Stealth

Yesterday was a long, exciting day. I got up very early to start teaching, and once I got there it was interesting to see the reactions of my students when I told them they'd have to keep blogs. Some were excited, some seemed agonized. Most seemed confused. I promised them that, some day, they would laugh about how overwhelming it seemed, but then I felt like a deluded technosnob. Anyway, the real excitement came later in the day, when I had lunch and a long studio visit with Trevor Paglen. Like me, Trevor lives nine lives, which include being an artist, a writer, and a PhD student at Cal. (He works in the Geography dept and his office is much cooler than mine!) Trevor and I also both lived in the same small town in Germany and we're both retired punk musicians, so there was much to talk about. But mostly we talked about his current art work which revolves around a vast network of top secret US military bases and classified projects. He's doing very interesting investigations that take the form of sound art, photography, performance, installation, and much ambiguous and tactical mediaesque stuff in between. I'm looking forward to including him in Network Nature, a show I'm curating at Foxy Production, in 2007, for Rhizome.org. More on that later...