Arklie Levi Hooten

MONITOR

British legal philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham introduced to society a new visual argument for behavioral manipulation in 1789. The Panopticon, a new typology for prison design, became a precedent for modern ideas of surveillance. It was only years after Bentham publications that philosopher Michael Foucault brought light to Bentham design and related writings as a comparison to the way modern societies control the general behavior of the public. Foucault calls the Panopticon a piece of political technology. It increased power and reduced space.

Contemporary film and communication technology have allowed those who seek power to take the concept which can be found in Bentham prison and become increasingly more transparent while using less and less space. Currently,

Contemporary Big Brother control methods blow away physical architecture. Camp X-ray, at Guantánamo, began as open cells, divided only by wire mesh, covered by sun shade sails, which gave complete day and night surveillance with floodlights. Modern versions of masks designed by Ludwig Friedrich yon Froriep (1846), which rob a prisoner of sight, hearing and the ability to speak, were to be seen worn by the prisoners, along with fluorescent uniforms, which marked them as easy targets, in the few photographs available to the world media. With wrist and ankle manacles a person can be immobilized, without architecture.

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Bentham’s social manipulation transcended not only defined space in modern surveillance, but also its original program. His prison sought to control those who had already been punished. Modern surveillance is used currently for monitoring the preemptive public at unprecedented levels. In the city of London, there is an estimated one camera for every 14 citizens. One great separation between Bentham’s original plan and current monitoring methods is the ability of proximity. In his book Zoomccape, Michael Schwarter discusses at length the ability for the camera to transcend the ordinary physical limitations of the being. People can now understand spaces with easy acquirement even though these are spaces that could never be understood as a first-hand experience. This gives the person the greater tools to understand landscapes differently. The same can be said for the cameras ability to understand the actions of people. While Bentham’s design greatly reduced the need for space, contemporary technology has almost eliminated the need for space completely. Social control has far transcended the walls of prisons. It has become almost undetectable.

In his book, Foucault went on to say that “visibility is a trap.” In Bentham’s prison, the prisoner is able to be seen but cannot see the one who observes him. The effectiveness of the design is executed with the ability to see and not be seen. This, while a seemingly accepted truth, is actually a myth. While the person who observes cannot be seen by those he watches,

he is monitored and controlled with equal degree by his own conscience. Maybe Foucault realized this and found the irony within the design. Artists Yoko Ono and John Lennon created a film in 1968 that finds the reflective nature of monitoring. The film, titled “Rape” is the story of a girl who is violently pursued by the camera—the presumed predator. After 70 minutes of watching the chase of an attractive young girl and witnessing her sad demise, Jonas Mekas states that two things are interesting to watch: one is the girl and the other is the audience. The “self-conscience and hence uncomfortable complicity” of the sequence allows the viewer to realize that surveillance does not only change the behavior of the one who is being watched but the behavior of those who witness as well. Visibility is indeed a trap.

Much of modernism dealt with transparency and utopian ideas of the connection through the production of glass. The idea of Surveillance has been made possible through the means of glass production. Diller and Scofidio claim that “transparent glass is no longer invisible. Rather it is a display surface that modifies behavior on both sides. Again, the one who views is not unsusceptible to consequence.

While then surveillance will always have ideas of structuralism rooted within its use, there could be other approaches to surveillance. There is the possibility of thinking about surveillance as record or archive. French photographer and anarchist

Henri Cartier-Bresson used surveillance as a means of understanding. History is typically written through interpretation. It is therefore subject to the biases of the writer. Surveillance provides a raw approach to recording. Sarah Hermanson states that photojournalism is the act of documenting “a particular event, place, or person.” While Bresson was extremely successful from an artistic standpoint alone, his ability to perceive things exactly as they happened will provide better evidence of the times over manipulated recitals of what the subject thought might have happened.

[references]

Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, eds. CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. MIT Press, 2001.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Hermanson, Sarah. “Henri Cartier-Bresson.” MoMa 3, no. 6 (September 2000): 31-32. http://www.jstor.org(accessed September 14, 2009).

Liu, Catherine. “A brief genealogy of privacy: ‘CTRL [space]: rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother’. Grey room (Spring 2004): 102-118. Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, EBSCOhost(accessed September 12, 2009).

Schwarzer, Mitchell. Zoomscape: architecture in motion and media. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Chicago Manuel Citation Guide

[images]

001 – Presidio Modelo (model prison), Isla de la Juventud, Cuba. SRC