Books:

Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imaginary after Film by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, MIT Press 2003

CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother by Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel

The physical reality of actual observation can be replaced by the potential of being watched to the same effect on those under that observation. This was Bentham’s Panoptic Principle – “everyone would internalise the disciplinary gaze.” Foucault wrote extensively on the ‘Disciplinary Society’ in his book Discipline and Punish 1975. What interested me about Foulcault’s attention to the Panopticon is that he came upon it while studying the origins of clinical medicine. He said, “I wanted to find out how the medical gaze was institutionalised, how it was effectively inscribed into social space.” It seems apt that I have returned, by default, to Edinburgh’s Clinical Research Centre to find a set of research images that I thought would appropriately link into my discussion topics of societal surveillance and control. The MRI scanner acts in the same way as an airport security baggage check does... but on humans. As Christian Katti says in CTRL Space, “every act of surveillance necessarily produces its opposite.” Like the MRI scanner (or the baggage check), for the internal to become visible on the screen, the external must be hidden inside the machine body.