war

Over at We Make Money Not Art, Regine has a great recap of Trevor Paglen's research on the black world of CIA-run torture taxis, secret government installations, and classified government projects. Regine writes "His artistic work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and other more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us." See here.

I brought Trevor to the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design as part of the New Spaces, New Cartographers series I organized when I was Forum president in 2004 and was greatly impressed by the research he did. In an era in which our lives become as transparent as the government becomes opaque, Trevor shows us how we can turn the tables a little.

Outside of our usual sphere of coverage, but nevertheless worth thinking about. In 1983 the world nearly came to an end. At the Russian equivalent of NORAD, alarms sounded indicating that the United States had launch a missile strike against the Soviet Union. In fact, it was faulty technology. But the effect would have been the same, if not for Stanislav Petrov's intuition and refusal to follow orders blindly.