Trevor Paglen knows that his latest project, “The Last Pictures,” is ridiculous. “This is the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do if you’re a critical artist,” he told ARTINFO. It’s true: “The Last Pictures” isn’t for sale and it can’t be displayed in a museum or gallery. Instead, it’s going to be shown in outer space. 

Over the last five years, Paglen has been painstakingly winnowing down the world’s entire photographic output in order to select 100 pictures for inclusion on an archival disk. This month, that disk — which resembles Carl Sagan’s “Voyager Golden Record” and contains images ranging from the iconic “Earthrise” to forgotten rocket launches and typhoons — will be affixed to the communications satellite EchoStar XVI and shot into Earth’s orbit. Perhaps the most permanent work of art ever commissioned, it will be on view for five billion years.

“Space seemed like an interesting place to have an art installation,” said Nato Thompson, chief curator of the public art nonprofit Creative Time, which sponsored the project. In advance of the satellite’s takeoff, ARTINFO spoke to Paglen about aliens, orbital space, and why we should go into the future bearing gifts.

What is ultimate goal of this crazy-sounding project?

From the get-go, I understood that what we’re doing is making cave paintings for the future. When we look back at cave paintings, we don’t know what the heck those people were thinking. We don’t know what any of it means — or if words like ‘means’ even apply to those kinds of images. And yet, we have them. We can think about them. We’re doing that for the future. On one hand, it’s an impossible project. At the same time, I wanted to take this very seriously as a thought experiment.

What methodology did you use to select the images?

I knew I didn’t want to represent humanity. The best you can do with that kind of gesture is come up with some multicultural god-knows-what. We know what that looks like: families holding hands. So I thought, “What this should really be about is not a portrait of humanity so much as a story about what humans did to themselves.” One of the things that characterizes the contemporary moment is that humans are doing all sorts of self-destructive things and we know that we’re doing them, but we’re going ahead with them anyway. So I set up a lot of interviews with people whose work spoke to that question. For example, I spoke with a biologist named Ignacio Chapela who became famous — or rather, infamous — for doing research that showed how genetically modified corn in Mexico was spreading its genome into mice. This caused a huge uproar in the scientific community because a lot of biology research is funded by biotechnology and by agribusiness, and they didn’t want to hear that.

Would the public recognize any of these images?

There are definitely some iconic images in there. The image that is the cover of the book is “Earthrise,” which is probably one of the most reproduced images in history. For me, this picture spoke to one of the contradictions we were interested in exploring. On the one hand, “Earthrise” is often read as an image of ecology. We see that earth is a closed system that we have to take care of because that’s all there is. But there’s another way of reading this image, and here I’m drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work a little bit. It can also be seen as a terrible icon. This is an image that tells us we can be separate from Earth. And that myth leads to all sorts of self-destructive behavior.

You’ve worked with satellites in your earlier, more political work. Did this change the way you think about these machines?

On the very practical level, the search for a spacecraft that would be in orbit for a very long time led me to thinking about these things not only as instruments of surveillance — as political machines — but also as artifacts, as sculptures that will remain.