Panopticon

In this offbeat mockumentary, Thompson Merrimack, Chairman of WorldWide Monitor, hosts a performance of the Surveillance Chamber Music Society in a celebration of Jeremy Bentham, whose architectural design of the Panopticon revolutionized systems of penal surveillance in the eighteenth century. By allowing prison guards to observe inmates without the inmates seeing them, Bentham's concept offered a tremendous boon to surveillance techniques and psychological control throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The live music performance is blended with historical photos, spy cameras, surveillance video and audio sensors to address issues of privacy in contemporary society.