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The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display. This came to pass, and his skeleton now sits in a glass case at University College London, adorned with a wax head, waistcoat and jacket and sat on a wooden stool, staring out at students from its glass case.
Bentham was regarded as the founder of utilitarianism and a leading advocate of the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and individual legal rights. And now, from beyond the grave, his cadaver contains a webcam that records the movements of its spectators and broadcasts them live online, part of UCL’s PanoptiCam project which tests, amonst other things, surveillance algorithms. As I write this, a young couple are walking across the corridor, his hand pressed against the small of her back.
Prof Melissa Terras, director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, tells me that the camera is used to learn the best way “to identify and count different people in still images, accurately.” UCL are hoping that it will spark discussion around contemporary surveillance, but it isn’t a coincidence that this webcam is attached to Bentham’s box. The PanoptiCam project is a pun on the “panopticon”, a type of institutional building that has long dominated Bentham’s legacy.
He describes the prisoner of a panopticon as being at the receiving end of asymmetrical surveillance: “He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.”
As a consequence, the inmate polices himself for fear of punishment.
“The principle is central inspection,” Schofield tells me. “You can do central inspection by CCTV. You don’t need a round building to do it. Monitoring electronic communications from a central location, that is panoptic. The real heart of Bentham’s panoptic idea is that there are certain activities which are better conducted when they are supervised.”
In many ways, the watchtower at the heart of the optician is a precursor to the cameras fastened to our buildings – purposely visible machines with human eyes hidden from view.
The parallels between the optician and CCTV may be obvious, but what happens when you step into the world of digital surveillance and data capture? Are we still “objects of information” as we swipe between cells on our smartphone screens?
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