Welcome to the panopticon!

The new boyfriend and I were having a chat about going to Canada when he was here this last weekend. Conversation went something like this:

Me: (head sunk in shame) I live just a few hours from the border and I've never been to Canada

Boy: Really, we can totaly fix that. But you know, I'm brown. I'm going to get harrased at the border.

Me: Hey, that's ok. I maybe look Italian or Spanish and my luggage gets "randomly searched" 90% of the time that I fly.

Boy: You do look generic european. It's probably cause they know you're trouble.

Me: Or it's that I insist on bringing vibrators with me on vacation.

So when I read about this artist today, my heart skipped a beat. Conceptual art that thumbs it's nose at the invasive nature of society, halleluja!

Hasan Elahi is a conceptual artist whose life is an ongoing work about surveillance. He starts by telling us a chilling story - his detention by the INS at Detroit Airport after returning from a trip from overseas. An immigration officer scanned his passport and blanched, then led Alahi through a maze under the airport to an INS detention facility. As a US citizen, this was pretty odd - he tried to talk with the guards to figure out what was going on. But it all became clearer when the man from the FBI in the dark suit came to talk with him.

For the next few months, every trip Elahi took, he’d call his FBI agent and give the routing, so he didn’t get detained along the way. He realized, after a point - why just tell the FBI - why not tell everyone?

So he hacked his cellphone into a tracking bracelet which he wears on his ankle, reporting his movements on a map - log onto his site and you can see that he’s in Camden. But he’s gone further, trying to document his life in a series of photos: the airports he passes through, the meals he eats, the bathrooms he uses. The result is a photographic record of his daily life which would be very hard to falsify. We all know photos can be digitally altered… but altering as many photos as Elahi puts online would require a whole team trying to build this alternative path through the world.

And while we're on the subject, the new boyfriend found a copy of Foucault's Discipline and Punish next to my bed. He thought it was going to be about a naughty subject, but no. It is about how a society allows itself to be placed under constant surveillance because of fear and what the consequnces are. It's about the panopticon society, where everyone is watched all the time but transgressions are only punished when the punishment will benefit the state.

Think about it. None of us are perfect 100% of the time. We litter or jaywalk. We commit tiny infractions all the time. But in a panopticon society those transgressions are captured forever to be used against us when it's convientent. Society is placed under the perpetual fear of discovery. Neighbors and family members turn into the people we fear most. They see us and all our faults. Big brother is not just an Orwellian idea or something that happened in those grey states of oppression like Stalinist Russia or Hitler's Germany.

The idea of the panopitcon, or the all-seeing prison came out of the prisoner reform movement of the late 1700's, early 1800's.

"A building circular... The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed... from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—The whole circuit reviewable with little, or... without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell."

Jeremy Bentham
Proposal for a New and Less Expensive mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts (London, 1798)

Today we are monitored by video cameras and credit card purchases. In the very near future people will be able to google someone by photo alone (think of the implications when your prospective employer uses your photo to see which anonymous dating sites you use or what your myspace profile says). I am a fairly open person. Hell, you all know about my love of vodka, stable boys and things that go buzzzz with batteries. But my boss doesn't need to know any of that. It has no relation to my ability to work.

Actually, I'm sitting in my lab right now drinking a coke and eating chips directly under a sign that reads in large type "NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THE LAB!" There is an agreement between the students and I that I will look the other way at their food and beverage consumption in the lab right up until they spill something and ruin a keyboard and they will ignore the delicous smell of chili cheese fritos wafting from my desk. This is one of those small transgressions that happens everyday without causing harm. But under the panopticon society, when I was threatening to sue because the administration was neglecting to pay me last summer, this little transgression would have been enough for them to threaten me with. The all seeing society puts way to much power to punish in the hands of those who already have power and eliminates the power of the individual to fight back. Mr. Elahi and his total survellience art project has shown us how to turn the panopticon back on itself.