Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen

A catalogue pairing filmmaker Harun Farocki and artist Trevor Paglen, both close observers of surveillance, espionage, and military image-making, with newly commissioned scholarly essays and visual essays drawn from a dialogue between their work.

Edited by curator Niels Van Tomme for the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the book accompanies an exhibition examining how both artists interrogate the ways military and intelligence operations transform, and complicate, our relationship to images and the realities they claim to represent. Farocki's essay films and Paglen's photographs of classified installations and reconnaissance satellites approach the same terrain, the machinery by which the state renders some things visible and others deliberately obscure, from different generations and different media. The volume includes texts by both artists alongside commissioned essays by Jimena Canales, Jonathan Kahana, and Hilde Van Gelder, plus three visual essays built around themes that emerge from putting the two bodies of work in conversation.

The accompanying exhibition opened at CADVC in 2014 and toured to the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago; and Be-Part, Waregem, Belgium, through early 2016.