Seminar 1 - Panopticism

Panopticism

• The shift in society from physical discipline/control to mental control
• Society makes us conform and behave in the way we believe we should act
• Foucault believes discipline is to train and to make someone more useful and productive in society

Panopticon

• Proposed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791
• Originally designed as a prison but also used for schools, asylums, 
• Prisoners were unable to see the other inmates as they were isolated and internalised
• Works around visibility - everyone is constantly on display but for it to work, the surveyors must have a sense of visibility and invisibility. Inmates need a reminder that they are being watched.
• Relies on surveillance 
• System for order and control of subjects

Power should be visible but never verifiable


Foucault and power

• Power is a relationship and not a thing or capacity we have. A <--> B. A only has a power over B if B willingly succumbs to the power/control. Marxists would say the ruling class have power over the working class A --> B. 
• SELF REGULATION - You control yourself
• There is always the possibility of resistance 
• Factories cannot function without workers 
• A school institution has power over teachers and students (panopticon).  It provides a system to monitor the monitor aswell as the monitored. 

Examples of Panopticism in today's society

1) Open plan office 

Appears to be more social than it actually is

All of the employees are being watched

2) Speed cameras 

Many do not even have cameras (removes the need for person A in Foucault's analogy - self regulation). There is a constant reminder of the camera therefore you begin to drive as you are supposed to drive. Where there is power, there is always a possibility of resistance as people usually just slow down for the camera). 

3) House of Commons 

Politicians know they are being recorded therefore they behave in a way which they believe will appeal to the general public in order to sway more votes. Their actions are constantly being assessed.

4) Facebook, Twitter

Panoptic monitoring system 

5) Gym

On display to people internally and externally

Docile Bodies

Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls Docile bodies

- Perfectly trained

- Pliable

- Conforming to society

- Obedient

- Self-monitoring


Task


Write a short, 300 word analysis of something in contemporary society that we believe is panoptic. Use terminology referenced in the lecture and seminar and 5 quotes from Foucault's writing. Seamlessly integrate these quotes and fragmented sentences into the analysis.

Lecture 2 - Technology will liberate us

Development of technology with art and design

Relevant books:

Digital currents by Margot Lovejoy
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (essay)
Art and the Age of Mass Media by John Walker
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

Summary of the lecture:

- Overview of the criticial and practical implications of technology upon art and its emergence within design.
- Evaluating what the implications of technology are on our design areas

• Technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness
• Technology trigger important changes in cultural development
• Walter Benhamin's essay 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' (1936) significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change. Balances between past and future in the emergence of technology. Critics are still writing about this essay due to its implications on how we work today.

All of these asses how technology is an instrument for change.

Task

Draw a doodle.. faithfully copy this.. and again.. and again.

This is my outstanding work of art:

Anything that is copied, reproduced or replicated is not in essence, the same as the original. It can either be a work in its own right or merely an image representation of the original. Benjamin's discussion is cruciial to understanding how art, design and media (early technology advancements aswell as new), is born from this scenario.

There are some artists and designers who purposely use the idea of replication and copy and some artists who critically comment on this in society.

Machine age / Modernism

The conversation between the two is all part of one period

Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction:

• The age of technology and art
• Parallel and specific to new developments; a duality expressing the zeitgeist
• Dialectical due to the copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original
• The aura and uniqueness of art

He claimed technology is parallel and specific to new developments.

Reproduction of the copy and the role of the original - Because of technology and the emergence of photography there is now such a thing as the original. We did not need to think about was the original and the copy before technology - it is only because of technology that we need to consider the uniqueness of the copy and its 'aura'.

When encountering the original work, there is an aura that is distinct.

An analogy of this would be a film sequels where people believe they are 'not as good as the original'

Photography

Photography is at the beginning of the technological relationship between art and design.

It is not just your own perception and what you see with your eye, it can used to create multiple viewing points and interpretations. 

John Berger's writing is in direct relation to the thoughts and critique of Walter Benjamin

Dziga Vertov - Man with the Movie Camera (1929)

The camera eye has a variable gaze and Benjamin claims a new consciousness is a result. It represents an idealism of faith and progress through technological process. 

Paul Valeria

'We must expect great innovations to transform the entire techniques of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing..." (rest on moodle)

Series of photogram

Merely a sheet of photographic paper with objects on top and exposed to light (early experiments with photography and technology).

Benjamin and two Parallels

Freud and Marz

Freud explores

Marx's thought explores economic that gave new political models of thinking over the work value of a work of art. He brings an understanding that technology changes the value of a work of art.

Marx

In reference to the doodles: Is the original worth more than the copy? What if a celebrity created the copy? The value can be distorted and changed. While the original may be valued, the copy, in consumerism and reproduction, adds value and consumed as valuable.

When distorted by mass media and celebrity culture, the value is again up for interpretation.

Marx foresaw this debate. Mass production and labour would lead to a bigger consumption of art and design.

Modernism likes to remain formal, composed whereas post-modernism destabilises these conventions and puts them into a new context. 

Freud

While Marx pursues the effect of art and design on society and the nature of art, Freud explores the materialism of technology in terms of how it can express our deepest subconscious.. this resulted in the movement of Dada etc. 

Kineticism

The idea of capturing movement.

Photographer (Marey Etienne-Jules) in 1888, he produced a series of kinetic photographs exploring the movement of the human body. 

- Development of chrono-photography. 

- His development of photography was vast.

- Space, time and place in a technological age. 

- These are the start of exploring how we portray movement in time.

This begins the de materialisation of art and design primarily because when you look at the recorded image, it starts to move away from form and object and moves into the realm of mere image. Once you move into just image, you can replicate it, reproduce it and transform it with the emergence of technology.

Dematerialization of art

Richard Hamilton (1922)

"Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?'

Experiments with the Dada movement

- Photomontage

- Clearly using technology to create image

What we see - images and objects are ordered, coded and styled. This is the beginning of art and design merging together. These separately lie within either art or design or both. 

Design is seen increasingly within art from this period.

Karl Marx and technology

Marx is associated with the term 'technological determinsm'. How technological determines economical production factors and affects social conditions. He examines closely the relationship of technological enterprise to other aspects of human activity.

He sees it as a role and tool for progress but also, a tool for alienation.

Dialectical issues

• Technology drives history
• Technology and the division of labour - Original & copy. The original is produced by one person with their own mode of production. 
• Materialist view of history of history
• Technology and capitalism and production
• Social alienation of people form aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism

Workers do not own their means of making work. (Look at Marx and alienation in more depth)

Cartoon (on presentation) explores link between capitalism, competition, selling of products and also the issue of power in the consumption of objects. There is a distinction between the labourer, the worker and the people who are selling.

Electronic age / Postmodernism

Post modern / Post machine

• Many electronic works were still made with the modern aesthetic
• Emergence of information and conceptual based works - how data is collected and documented
• The computer a natural metaphor
• A spirit of openness to industrial techniques - moves away from a modernist aesthetic. We replace, move on and develop. We consume technology and in turn, develop new techniques - this is a shift from modernism. Everything becomes image and illusion-based.
• Collaborations between art and science

This collaboration breaks boundaries as a result of technology. The computer and technology allows you to shift one idea across to another context or media.

'Falling / Falling' by Douglas Rosenberg (1998)

- Multimedia, video installation (itself becomes an object)

- Dance, performance and media with text projection

- Different artistic forms merge and form new works

Publicly cremated 13 years worth of art (look up)

'I will not make any more boring art'

Simulation and Simulacrum

A simulated image (or a copy) of an experience, a replication of something. It is simulated and not meant to be real. However, simulacrum explains the simulation also becomes real - a huge effect on art and design. It becomes and object and a form in its own right. It plays with what is 'real' and what is an 'illusion'.

Jean Baudrillard (1981)

• It is the reflection of a profound reality
• It masks and denatures (distorts) a profound reality
• It masts the absence of a profound reality (it can become reality in its own right)
• It has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum

What is virtual and what is not, what is seen as real and what is not.

Benjamin talks about society an illusion. Baudrillard extends this to simulacrum and the reality and illusion of art and design.

We take word and mouth as factual as we view the spoken word as reality and truth.

Nam June Paik

He used technologies as a critique on their actual affect on society
- Cello out of televisions
- Bhudda watching TV just chilling

Plays with the idea of what is real and what isn't.


'Art in the age of mass media' by John Walker (2001)

• Art uses mass media (1990 - 2000)
• Art in advertisements
• The artist as media celebrity - Andy Warhol - Art has become design

At what point does art become design and vice versa? 

Digital age

'Digital Currents' by Margot Lovejoy

• Digital potential leads to multimedia productions
• Technological reduction of all images so they are addressed by the computer
• New contexts created as a result

Jenny Holzer

• Digital projections as installations and illusions of images
• She transforms surfaces and buildings as images alone
• Experiments with Simulacrum 
• Visually extends space beyond its immediate space

'Blue Tilt' (2004)

'Baltic Centre' (2000)

Staircase (1998)

Fran Gillette

• Real and fantastical imagery
• Patterns can be created as a result of this

Nancy Bersom - The Human Race Machine

• Morphing technology (originally used in the FBI)
• Examines characteristics in the human face

Multimedia work

• Interactivity
• Performance
• Transdisciplinary approaches
• Time, space and motion explored in art and as art
• Collaborations between different technologies and artforms
• Computer as a tool for integrating media

Hyperreal; reality by proxy

• These images are not all real
• Part animation, part real people
• How we project and play with what is real

Conclusion

• Art comments on the ideology of everyday life
• Art can be expressive of the progressive
• Technological tools can blur the line between production of fine art works and commercial and design production - they are no longer distinct

Lecture 1 - Panopticism

Institutions & institutional power  

"Literature, art and their respective produces do not exist independently…"
 - Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (full quote on VLE)

How institutions control our thoughts and behaviour
How our ideas are not produced independently - everything determines what we product

Michael Foucault  
1926 - 1984

Activist for gay rights, civil rights etc (research in more depth)

1) Madness & civilisation (asylum, psychiatry)
2) Discipline & punish (the birth of prison)

In pre-modern societies, madness was through differently as they led a very tolerant life. They were seen as endearing and entertaining and were accepted as part of society.

In the end of the 1600's, there was a change of society due to the rise of religion Those who fell out of the socially accepted norm were stigmatised

The Great Confinement (GET IMAGES)

- For those who were not socially productive
- The insane, criminal, poor, unemployed, single mothers and those who couldn't work
- They were forced to work with the threat of being beater
- Used to curb unemployment
- Corrupted people even more

Different institutions began to emerge
- The birth of the asylum
- Sane were separated from the insane
- Distinction between 'normal' and 'abnormal'
- Were judged who was 'right' or 'wrong'
- Insane were treated like minors
- Given rewards for doing things well

Foucault sees this as an important shift as society soon starts to realise there are other ways to control citizens than using physical punishment.

Emergence of forms of knowledge

- Biology, psychiatry, medicine etc
- Legitimise the practices of hospitals
- Foucault aims to show these affects society dramatically (LOOK AT VLE)

Pre-modern societies  

Abnormal/deviants were publicly humiliated and punished
Punishment wasn't used to 'correct' or 'train', it was simply a means of showing being abnormal is not acceptable

Guy Fawkes
- "That you be drawn on a hurdle…" QUOTE ON PRESENTATION
- Made an example of him
- Shows no one should challenge the King

Guillotine
- Idea of control
- Wielding the head in-front of others connotes power

Panopticon  

Designed by Jermemy Bentham (LOOK IN MORE DEPTH)
- An analogy of modern disciplinary society and social control
- Foucault writes in 1970 about 1791 Panopticon
- There were many uses including
    - Hospitals
    - Schools
    - Asylum
    - Prison

Cells around the outside were looking onto a centralised tower where guards were stationed. Prisoners were constantly backlit and were unable to communicate with others.

- Each prisoner can see the central observation tower
- Were unable to see each other
- Permanently on display & isolated
- The tower was not lit so prisoners could not see they were being watched but knew they were; however, this could not be verified by themselves

** The panopticon internalises in the individual's conscious state that he is always being watched **

- Prisoners always under scrutiny
- People begin to control themselves and did not attempt to escape
- Bars or even guards were not necessary as people controlled themselves rather than having to be controlled
- it was an internal responsibility
- Mental punishment, not physical

"Hence the major effect…" ON PRESENTATION

Surrey Asylum
- Isolated laboratories
- Treated as lab rats
- Were compared and contrasted against one another

Presidio Modelo

The Presidio Modelo was a "model prison" of Panopticon design. It was built in Cuba under President-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado between 1926–1928. Although it was built to house 2500 prisoners, by 1961, there were 6000 - 8000 prisoners leading to riots and hunger strikes due to overpopulation.

The purpose of the Panopticon

- Allows scrutiny
- Aims to make them productive and useful
- Allows supervision to experiment on subjects

In a lecture theatre, for example, the tutor can see everyone who are aware they are being watched, therefore making them more productive - the know they will be inevitably caught out if not behaving in the 'correct' manner.

- Reforms prisoners
- Helps treat patients
- Helps instruct schoolchilden
- Helps confine and study the insane
- Helps supervise workers

Elements of panopticism can be seen in contemporary life  

** Acting in the way you THINK a NORMAL citizen should act **

Open plan office
- Boss can see all employees
- Employees known they can be caught out
- People are more productive
- Boss is a reminder of institutional power, much like the guards in the Panopticon

The Office (TV show)
- David brent knows he is being filmed, watched and observed
- Causes him to change his behaviour, much to the confusion of his employees

Library
- Behaviour changes
- Automatic silence without any indication/warning necessary

Pubs/bars
- Traditional pubs are modular and intimate
- In modern/contemporary bars, you know you are being watched and therefore feel less at ease
- Spaces are easier to control

CCTV is an obvious example
- Visible reminder therefore there is no need for them to be hidden
- Instructed to behave
- People shouldn't need to be caught out, they should already know how to behave therefore CCTV cameras are used as a warning

Google Maps
- Personal knowledge is available for everyone to access
- Our lives are recorded and we are constantly reminded
- Fear of being caught out

Pentonville Prison (LOOK UP ONLINE)

Broherton Library (LOOK UP ONLINE)
- Elements of the Panopticon

Registers
- Constantly monitored
- Compare and contrast with other students
- We as students are subject to panopticism

Disciplinary techniques  

QUOTE BY DAMAHER, SCHIRATOR & WEBB

- Gyms, 5-a-day, health initiatives
- Everyone becomes healthier so they are better workers
- Visual reminders that bodies are always on display
- No-one forces you to go to the gym
- Self-anxiety

Television
- Metaphor of panopticism
- Fixed, controlled (even if communal)
- Constantly receiving instructions

1984 book/film
- Panopticism is evident throughout
- Every single action of the protagonist is caught out
- Everything is done internally

Facebook/social media
- Everything you post is recorded and watched by your circle of friends
- Your own behaviour is monitored constantly
- Forces you to alter your own behaviour - you are not always 'yourself'

Art  

Vito Acconi 'Following piece' (1969)
- Responded to panopticism
- Follows people around their daily life

** We live in an illusion where we are in control of our own lives **

Chris Burden 'Samson' (1985)
- Visitors become subjects
- Beam of oak attached to a vice which is pushed against the supporting walls
- The turnstile entrances tightens the vice
- The more people who enter, the more likely the room will collapse
- Art controlling the institution and its visitors

Summary  

Panopticism relies on people knowing they are visible and being monitored
Relationship between power, knowledge and the body
- Direct relationship between mental and physical control
- "Power relations have an immediate…" QUOTE PRESENTATION

Displinary society produces what Foucault calls 'docile bodies'
- Self-monitoring
- Self-correcting
- Obedient, docile bodies

Foucault's definition is NOT a top-down model as with Marism (that ruling class has a power over the working class which they can exercise whenever. Power is not a thing or a capacity people have - it is a relation between individuals and groups and only exists when being exercised.  The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity of people. (REST ON VLE)

OUCS206 Module Brief

END OF 1ST YEAR