Underground geographer Trevor Paglen traces the hidden forces that constitute the Prison Industrial Complex in his latest survey of surveillance interventions. Recording Carceral Landscapes opens at The Lab in San Francisco this Friday (04.29), and presents a topography of multimedia installations (using images, video, audio recordings, and proposed re-designs of prisons), to help make evident the secret ecology behind our incarceration machine.
"Paglen records numerous encounters using a set of specialized gadgets to surveil the people and places that drive California's massive prison system. From Pelican Bay State Prison to the California Correctional Peace Officers Association headquarters, and from the inner chambers of Sacramento to the financial centers of the Bay Area, this project shows how mass-imprisonment has insinuated itself into the very fabric of the state, and how prisons themselves are only one part of the Prison Industrial Complex."







Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer currently working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Project Team: Trevor Paglen, Carrie Foster, Matt Wittman, and the Nsumi group.