Por Rodrigo Firmino
The idea of this project came from the irony of having the skeleton of the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham (with a wax head and real clothes) – known, among other things, for designing and proposing the panopticon, later explored by the French philosopher Michel Foucault – recording images of passers-by and visitors in one of the rooms in the main building of the University College London (UCL).
I wanted to play with this ironic scene. Of course, there is the interesting issue of cameras being used to watch public spaces, which is a theme that motivates part of my academic work too (see this paper on the subject). So, since I was working at UCL, I decided to pay Jeremy a visit, every weekday, so that we could “talk” about surveillance. Every time, I showed Jeremy a different sentence while he was watching me watching him. I guess, in the end, I was “watching Jeremy watching me watching Jeremy”! Just to add to the confusion, I realised that in doing this, I was, myself, also becoming part of the object of study of the PanoptiCam project (a sort of lab rat). I was asking myself, who is watching whom, and who is studying whom?…
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