Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Southampton Solent University
Panopticon Letters:
An experimental film that uses the science fiction genre to investigate ideas concerning memory,
‘Panopticon Letters’ is an experimental film that uses the science fiction genre to investigate ideas concerning memory, the body and colonialism, whilst at the same time referencing dissonant histories explored within traditions of British landscape painting. It seeks to pare down elements of sky and water into minimal gradations of light and colour mixed with Freudian notions of ‘haunting’ that provoke the 'embodied encounter' that produces the object of art. Sky and water are severed from their spatial anchor in the horizon-line that integrates the abstracted qualities of each into a knowable and humanised realism. The serial architectonics of panopticism are evoked by filmic sleights of hand working with, parallel to, and at counter purpose to the soundtrack. This sets up a complex framework of counterpoint strategies - between portions of the image, between image and sound, and within the construction of the soundtrack itself.
The film utilizes a series of techniques to play with notions of falsified and confused representations. These are set against Jeremy Bentham’s (1748-1832) technical descriptions and architectural plans for his ideal prison 'The Panopticon’. Through my boat/film journey along the Thames, which forms the main visual component of the film, I encountered histories and geographies that provoked memories of trauma, which created new narratives that shaped the film. The voice of Bentham's benign paternalism is fissured throughout by my own fictionalized narratives. Panopticon Letters uses his ideas relating to the gaze as a controlling and benign tool of instruction as the central architectural metaphor within the panopticon system. This in turn is linked to the way in which modes of perception have been pared down in the 20th Century based on an obsession with sight. The ‘tonal’ shifts between digital and 16mm contest the philosophy of sight as the primary means of comprehending the world.
