Trevor Paglen’s “Doty” Streaming on e-flux: February 12–18

Streaming for free on e-flux from February 12 to 18, the film is a 60-minute interview with Richard Doty, a former employee of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland AFB, whose responsibilities included recruiting spies and disseminating disinformation regarding alien and extraterrestrial intelligences.

Paglen recorded the interview at UNM’s ARTSLab in September of 2022. Paglen, his cinematographer, Daniel Neves, UNM graduate student, Jessica Metz (Art & Ecology), and faculty member Stewart Skylar Copeland (Experimental Art & Technology) constructed a twelve-foot-tall, illuminated cube with over 740 square feet of production silks and 20 lights. The interview subject sat inside the cube and held a conversation with Paglen through a video feed displayed on a teleprompter (an interview technique pioneered by Errol Morris and often referred to as “The Interrotron”).

Doty is the fifth installment of Uncomputables: On Cybernetics and Alien Intelligences, an online program of films and accompanying texts convened by Agnieszka Kurant as the thirteenth cycle of Artist Cinemas, a long-term, online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Film.

https://www.e-flux.com/film/556599/doty/