As part of his training to join the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), Richard Doty was taught how to recruit spies, conduct and resist interrogations, run surveillance operations, and organize and manage deception and disinformation campaigns. After graduation, he was assigned to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, NM. During his active yearsContinue reading “Doty”
Tag Archives: Space
Palladium Variation #4
In late October, 1962 an American fighter jet out of Key West screamed south towards Havana Bay. The reaction was almost immediate: the Cuban military scrambled a pair of interceptors and raced north to meet the intruder. Just as the American jet neared the coastline, it banked north, flying impossibly fast and remaining just outContinue reading “Palladium Variation #4”
UNIDS
For the last several years, I’ve been undertaking the most technically challenging photography series I’ve ever attempted: a project to photograph objects of unknown origin in orbit around the earth. There are roughly 350 objects in orbit around the earth whose origins are unknown. These fall roughly into two categories: 1) Objects that the USContinue reading “UNIDS”
The Other Night Sky
This is an ongoing project to track and photograph the world of secret satellites that are above our heads nearly constantly. Although the satellites I track and photograph in this series are not typically acknowledged by the United States, they are cataloged and observed by an international network of amateur “satellite observers,” whose observations IContinue reading “The Other Night Sky”
The Fence
In 1979, astronomer W. T. “Woody” Sullivan worked with two undergraduates at the University of Washington to publish a now-classic paper entitled “Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of Earth.” Sullivan et al. found that the brightest continuous signals emanating from earth came from military radar systems designed to detect ballistic missiles and track satellites in earth orbit,Continue reading “The Fence”
Orbital Reflector
Produced in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, Orbital Reflector is a sculpture constructed of a lightweight and highly-reflective polyethylene material housed in a small box-like satellite bus. The satellite was meant to be inserted into orbit and after a few days deploy the reflective structure, creating a 100m long diamond-shaped mirror to reflect sunlightContinue reading “Orbital Reflector”
Nonfunctional Satellites
The “nonfunctional satellites” are sculptures designed to be placed into low-earth orbit where they will appear as bright points of light slowly moving across the sky to viewers on earth’s surface. They are designed to last for only a few weeks before burning up in the atmosphere. Developed in collaboration with aerospace engineers, the designsContinue reading “Nonfunctional Satellites”
Sites Unseen
Sites Unseen was a major solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum curated by John P. Jacob, where I presented my early photographic series alongside more recent sculptural objects and new work with AI. With this exhibition I continued my contribution to the ongoing conversation about privacy and surveillance in contemporary society. There wasContinue reading “Sites Unseen”
An Entangled Bank
“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” So begins the last paragraph of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For Darwin, life is not reducible to bitsContinue reading “An Entangled Bank”
A Dictionary of Volapük
In 1879 in Baden, Germany, Father Johann Martin Schleyer created a universal language at the behest of God, speaking to Schleyer in a dream. He called this new language Volapük or “World Speak.” Volapük was a simple language meant to give Catholic readers from different linguistic backgrounds an easier time reading aloud from the Bible.Continue reading “A Dictionary of Volapük”