Control and Surveillance: The Modern Panopticon
INTRODUCTION TO ‘CONTROL & SURVEILLANCE: THE MODERN PANOPTICON’
Foucault in his book “Discipline and Punish” talks about a new type of social structure, which replaces the old society of the spectacle for a surveillance one, building new disciplinary mechanisms which ensure the control and the “normality” of individuals who are part of that particular society.
In this programme of events, through different projects such as workshops, public space interventions, and project presentations, we will investigate how something which started as a tragic and painful loss of privacy and freedom, has become today normal and accepted by most of society.
The project is curated by independent curator and artist Jon Irigoyen (ES/FI), with the participation of Constanza Piña (Chile), Alejo Duque (Colombia), Moritz Bartl (DE) and Hamilton Mestizo of Sonema Collective (Colombia), with Irigoyen also taking part in events.
*Panopticon:A type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late Eighteenth Century. The concept of the design was to allow a watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution, normally a jail or a hospital, without their being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.