Photography is the act of capturing the visual world, taking something you can see and

sharing it with somebody else.

But artist Trevor Paglin has made a career of photographing things that you can't see.

Things that have been intentionally hidden.

Paglin's work looks at the shadowy worlds of government surveillance, of CIA black

sites, and even things like artificial intelligence in machine learning.

And he takes these pretty abstract concepts and helps make them concrete, physical.

He maps them to our world.

You look at the sky, wide open desert, and you look for kind of a second longer and you

realize it looks like little bugs are flying around in the sky and then you look a second

longer than that you realize these are drones.

I'm Dylan Thuras and this is Atlas Obscura.

Today we're talking with artist Trevor Paglin.

He's a self-described experimental geographer, he's an award-winning artist, he's a photographer,

and he is going to tell us how to look for the things that we're not quite supposed

to be able to see.

Let's see what happens after this.

Trevor Paglin's job, the thing he does with his time, is to help explore these hidden

worlds of government surveillance, of national security infrastructure, of artificial intelligence.

And because he cares about how these places interact with the physical world, it means

that he actually ends up going to some pretty strange and unusual locations.

So when Trevor joined me from Berlin on this phone call, I wanted to start our conversation

...