Minnesota Street Project Foundation and Altman Siegal present the West Coast debut of Trevor Paglen’s video Doty (2023) at 1201 Minnesota Street. The screening takes place in conjunction with the presentation of CARDINALS, a new body of work marking Trevor Paglen’s fifth solo exhibition with Altman Siegel. On view at Altman Siegel from September 5 through November 2, 2024, CARDINALS is composed of photographs of novel aerial phenomena taken by Paglen over the last two decades. 

Complementing the screening program, Trevor Paglen will be joined in conversation by author and scholar Erik Davis on Tuesday, September 2024. 

“The calls started around 2006. I’d spent years poking around and photographing classified Air Force installations, talking to former workers on top-secret airplanes, visiting CIA ‘black sites,’ and hunting down anyone I could find with knowledge of the Pentagon’s ‘black world.’ I was furiously working on a book about what I’d discovered. That’s when the calls started. Every few weeks, I’d end up in long conversations with people alleging to be sources deep in the military and intelligence establishments. One man, claiming to work on top-secret projects at Edwards Air Force Base told me about a highly-classified manned spaceflight program, and described an obscure unit patch fabricated from material found on experimental space-suits. Another told me about crash-recovery teams charged with collecting debris from downed foreign satellites and even more ‘exotic’ technologies, while acknowledging an active CIA misinformation campaign around said tech. UFOs were a constant theme. 

I never met any of these characters in person, and I didn’t make much of those calls at the time. As far as I was concerned, anything I couldn’t validate was irrelevant. I forgot about them. Only in retrospect did I come to believe that I may have been the target of a disinformation campaign. More recently, I made a video installation profiling Richard Doty, an Air Force counterintelligence officer and ‘Mirage Man’ who used UFO lore to spread disinformation about Air Force technology programs. Doty is a strange and mercurial character: after leaving the Air Force he came out as a UFO ‘whistleblower,’ telling stories about ‘real’ UFO programs he was tasked with protecting. In our conversations, he mentioned that the Air Force has an unofficial code name for exotic aircraft of unknown origin: CARDINALS. 

Why UFOs? Why have they been so closely linked to technology and disinformation? UFOs are deeply weird: they simultaneously exist and do not exist.” — Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) lives and works in New York, NY. As an artist, filmmaker, investigator, technologist, and theorist, Paglen asks questions around vision, perception, materiality, and aesthetics. His wide-ranging oeuvre includes work on artificial intelligence and computer vision, aerospace technology, secrecy and conspiracy, experimental landscapes, speculative fiction, nuclear histories, notional archaeology, psychological operations, and the Weird. Paglen’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin, Germany; Pace Gallery, Seoul, Korea and New York, NY; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Barbican Centre, London, UK; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; MCA San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, Sweden; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Secession, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo, Norway; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA. Paglen received the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2018 and was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.

Erik Davis is an author, teacher, and independent scholar based in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024), a study of LSD blotter art. He also wrote High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019), Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010), and the cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technology, drugs, and consciousness culture have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. He also writes a Substack called Burning Shore, and co-runs Alembic, a center in Berkeley devoted to meditation, movement, and visionary arts and culture.

Image: Trevor Paglen, Doty (still), 2023, single channel video projection, black and white, stereo mix. Dimensions variable, 66 min. © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of the Artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Pace Gallery.