panoptICONS Utrecht 2010 from Helden on Vimeo.
If you weren’t forced to endure a horrid class on media theories in your first year of university (lucky!), the word “Panopticon” might be totally foreign to you. It was a name given, in 1785, to a prison building, whose designed allowed prisoners to be observed at all times, without being able to do any observing of their own. It’s also used as a contemporary metaphor for things like CCTV and shows like Big Brother.
The idea’s been re-imagined recently by Thomas voor ’t Hekke and Bas van Oerle, two dutch artists whose project panoptICONS “addresses the fact that you are constantly being watched by surveillance cameras in city centres.”
By attaching their own surveillance cameras to the bodies of birds and placing them throughout the city centre of Utrecht in the Netherlands, the artists are demonstrating how such invasions of privacy “feed on our presence”.
