After our last tutorial in January, coming out of the university, I stopped in front of the Tate and saw this blank facade. Straight away I felt that it could become a possible site for an outdoor projection. It is perfectly located parallel to our school and could be a perfect site. I decided to head straight to the Tate's archives to find out more about the building. After some research I found out that the Tate used to be the site of Millbank Penitentiary, a panopticon prison. A form of prison which reflected Jeremy Bentham’s ideas, a 19th century British social reformer and philosopher. Its architectural design concept was to allow guards to observe prisoners from a central viewing point without prisoners being able to know whether they were being watched. The prison’s structure was composed of six polygons which extended out of a central hexagon, inside which was located the governor’s house. Bentham described it as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”[1]
Millbank Prison – Copied from model by the clerk of works undated in Richardson J London and its people, 1995.
Millbank Prison, Source Old Ordnance Survey Maps Pimlico, Sloane Square & Nine Elms, 1869.He believed that this spatial design would refrain prisoners from misbehaving in order to avoid punishment. The panopticon created a great deal of theoretical debates and had a strong impact on the layout of prisons, as well as schools, hospitals and factories. Reintroduced into philosophical discussions by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in 1975 as a model for the construction of power, the controlled environment of the panopticon has since become synonymous of the vast surveillance practices of the modern world. The United Kingdom is seen as a pioneer of mass surveillance and was described as being the most surveilled country among the industrialized western states[2].
This new information about my possible new site seemed to match together well with my ideas as film, photography, and video projection are all visual. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this information but at least i feel like I'm going in the right direction.
[1] Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon (Preface). In Miran Bozovic (ed.), The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso, 1995, 29-95
[2] BBC News – Britain is ‘surveillance society’, 2nd November 2006
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