Terminal Air

by the Institute for Applied Autonomy and Trevor Paglen

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/index.html

Terminal Air is an installation that attempts to envision the CIA office cum-travel agency in Langley, Virginia from which the Extraordinary Rendition Program—an initiative through which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation—is presumably coordinated. Represented on two large wall displays is a speculative visualization of the known movements of some 30 of these planes. The map on the left indicates the planes movements during the last 6 years. The screen on the right lists the 10 most recent flights. Periodically new information on a plane's whereabouts will arrive and will be indicated on the map display and by the ringing telephones. Please feel free to answer them.

Flight logs and inspiration have been provided by Trevor Paglen, author of Torture Taxi: On the trail of the CIA's rendition flights (Melville House Publishing) and by Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane - the true story of the CIA torture program (St Martin's Press), on his website, www.ghostplane.net

Institute for Applied Autonomy and Trevor Paglen Bios
The Institute for Applied Autonomy was founded in 1998 as an anonymous collective of engineers, designers, artists and activists who are united by the cause of individual and collective self-determination. The group's stated mission is to develop technologies that extend the autonomy of human activists in the performance of real-world, public acts of expression. The results have included an ultra-cute robot designed for targeted distribution of subversive literature and a small tele-operated robot designed for high-speed graffiti deployment from a remote location. The project I-See is a web-based navigation service that allows users to avoid surveillance altogether by providing them with the path of least surveillance to their destination. TXTmob is a cellphone text message broadcasting system that allows users to send messages to huge numbers of other users. TXTmob was used as an organizational technology during several large-scale public events.

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of Berkeley, California. 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. His most recent projects take up secret military bases, the California prison system, and the CIA's practice of "extraordinary rendition".
Paglen's artwork has been shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), the California College of the Arts (2002), MASSMOCA (2006), Diverse Works (2005), the LAB (2005), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. In 2003, Paglen started a project called the expeditions which involves leading groups of people to observe secret military bases in the southwestern United States.
In addition to his art work, Paglen writes for both popular and academic audiences. Recent articles have been published in Blu Magazine, Art Journal, Cultural Geographies, Clamor Magazine, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He is currently collaborating with investigative journalist A.C. Thompson on a book about the CIA's fleet of "torture planes" entitled Torture Taxi (Melville House, Fall 2006).
Paglen holds 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.