Minnesota Street Project Foundation will screen Trevor Paglen’s single-channel video Doty (2023) from September 19 through October 5, 2024 at 1201 Minnesota Street. This showcase is presented in conjunction with CARDINALS, a new body of work marking Trevor Paglen’s fifth solo exhibition with Altman Siegel.

“The calls started around 2006. I’d spent years poking around and photographing classified Air Force installations, talking to former workers on top-secret airplanes, visiting CIA ‘black sites,’ and hunting down anyone I could find with knowledge of the Pentagon’s ‘black world.’ I was furiously working on a book about what I’d discovered. That’s when the calls started. Every few weeks, I’d end up in long conversations with people alleging to be sources deep in the military and intelligence establishments. One man, claiming to work on top-secret projects at Edwards Air Force Base told me about a highly-classified manned spaceflight program, and described an obscure unit patch fabricated from material found on experimental space-suits. Another told me about crash-recovery teams charged with collecting debris from downed foreign satellites and even more ‘exotic’ technologies, while acknowledging an active CIA misinformation campaign around said tech. UFOs were a constant theme. I never met any of these characters in person, and I didn’t make much of those calls at the time. As far as I was concerned, anything I couldn’t validate was irrelevant. I forgot about them. Only in retrospect did I come to believe that I may have been the target of a disinformation campaign. More recently, I made a video installation profiling Richard Doty, an Air Force counterintelligence officer and ‘Mirage Man’ who used UFO lore to spread disinformation about Air Force technology programs. Doty is a strange and mercurial character: after leaving the Air Force he came out as a UFO ‘whistleblower,’ telling stories about ‘real’ UFO programs he was tasked with protecting. In our conversations, he mentioned that the Air Force has an unofficial code name for exotic aircraft of unknown origin: CARDINALS. Why UFOs? Why have they been so closely linked to technology and disinformation? UFOs are deeply weird: they simultaneously exist and do not exist.” — Trevor Paglen