Steve Anderson

The Secret Bases: Exploring the Pentagon’s “Black World”

Over the last several years Pentagon spending on secret projects has reached unprecedented levels. This level of hidden military spending translates into a variety of extremely peculiar built environments and landscapes. From the popular phenomenon of “Area 51,” to nondescript locales like the Helendale Avionics Facility, the Southwest is littered with places where the military develops, tests, and operates technologies that “do not exist.” Defense industry insiders refer to this assemblage of clandestine infrastructures, secret bases, and state capacities as the “black world” (and yes, they really do talk like that).

For geographers and cultural producers, these hidden military landscapes pose bizarre visual and epistemic challenges and paradoxes. How might we see places whose very existence is a state secret? What are some empirical means that we can use to detect the presence of carefully constructed absences? What happens when the norms of visuality and intelligibility begin to collapse? What do these epistemic limit-cases look like? What do they sound like?

In order to pursue this project, I have developed some unorthodox methods to research and document traces of hidden military landscapes, movements, and economies. These techniques include “limit telephotography,” symbology, ad-hoc participatory anthropology, amateur geospatial intelligence collection, plane-spotting, and military communications monitoring. In this presentation, I will demonstrate some of these unusual techniques and discuss some of the projects that have come out of these efforts.