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Article snippet: ‘‘Are we being watched?’’ I ask Trevor Paglen at his central Berlin studio. The prewar apartment was once surely the most surveilled place in the city, having formerly belonged to his friend Laura Poitras, the director who helped Edward Snowden go public. ‘‘We’re always being watched,’’ he replies. The space is filled with computers: Against one wall, an assistant writes code while another researches data used to train artificial intelligence. Opposite is a long credenza filled with art monographs and topped by a slightly sinister collection of objets: a Dungeons & Dragons-style dragon trophy with a shield and saber; a toy model of the stealth submarine U.S.S. Jimmy Carter; and ‘‘Black Ops’’ military patches, including some Paglen made himself. In one of them, dinosaurs of the future look up in wonder at the derelict satellites left behind by extinct humans. There’s a certain irony in the artist and author being based in the former G.D.R., where citizens were once pressured into spying on one another for the Stasi, which left behind miles of documents when the wall fell in 1989. Fifteen years later, Paglen, who already had an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was working on his doctorate in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, when he saw redacted portions of a map of the Mojave Desert and began photographing classified military installations, outfitting cameras with special lenses used in astrophotography. Ever since, he... Link to the full article to read more