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Beta Space: Trevor Paglen
October 25, 2023
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November 6, 2022
Trevor Paglen is known for investigating the invisible through the visible, with a wide-reaching approach that spans image making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. To this end, he has developed an artifact designed to last billions of years—an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs—that has been orbiting Earth since 2012 and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. For his first sound commission, Paglen will create a site-specific timepiece for downtown San José and the seventh iteration of the Museum’s ongoing “Beta Space” series—an ongoing commissioning program that offers artists opportunities to experiment with and exhibit new ideas, materials, and modes of working. Recent “Beta Space” artists include Pae White (2020), Victor Cartagena (2017), and Diana Thater (2015).
Beta Space: Trevor Paglen features a new public sound piece titled There will come soft rains (2021). Investigating the triangulation between sound, time, and truth, the work will be installed in the SJMA’s historic clocktower and resound into the streets of downtown San José. Everyday, on the hour between 8am and 8pm, Paglen’s sound piece will emanate real-time temporal and environmental facts. Beginning with the current time and weather, a voice synthesizer reads dynamically generated text from “official” data sets like satellite navigation systems, the UN critically endangered species list, and Cal Fire updates. Resonating through downtown, aural information recasts the texture of the city for approximately 45 seconds each time the work sounds. This project joins other artworks such as The Last Pictures (2012) and Trinity Cube(2015) that explore the ethics and politics of human interventions into geologic time.
The year-long installation opens on First Friday, November 5, 2021 and be up through November 6, 2022.
The poem There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale, written near the end of WW1: https://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains
Beta Space: Trevor Paglen
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Trevor Paglen was in Camp Springs, Maryland in 1974. He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley; an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago; and a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Paglen has had numerous one-person exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2015); Protocinema, Istanbul (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2013); and Vienna Secession (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Tate Modern, London, among others. Paglen is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography and visuality, and has contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour. He received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award (2014); the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2016); and the MacArthur genius grant (2017). Paglen lives and works in New York and Berlin.
There Will Come Soft Rains- short story and poem
The short story by Ray Bradbury: Download from the Brown Bag PDF button.
Sara Teasdale - 1884-1933 There Will Come Soft Rains
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
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