PanoptiCam launched
By Rudolf Ammann, on 23 March 2015
PanoptiCam is a new project running a surveillance camera on Jeremy Bentham’s cabinet in the university’s South Cloisters:
Seeing Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon can evoke a wide array of emotions from surprise and shock to mirth. PanoptiCam captures people’s reaction using a webcam mounted above the auto-icon, with the camera feed posted to our website in real time, and time lapse photography generating days in the life of Jeremy Bentham’s current, yet eternal, viewpoint.
We’ve rounded up a few captures and provided a bit of background on the project logo.
There is a Twitter feed for project news and another for hourly scheduled captures.
PanoptiCam has been noted in a few articles from around the world:
- 17 Mar 2015: E. McCarthy, Jeremy Bentham’s Memorial Now Watches Its Visitors, Mental Floss
- 17 Mar 2015: Watching you watching Bentham: The PanoptiCam, UCL News
- 16 Mar 2015: A.C. Estes, The Corpse of the Panopticon Creator Now Has an All-Seeing Eye, Gizmodo
- 16 Mar 2015: A.C. Madrigal, The panopticon creator’s memorial now surveils visitors, Fusion
The project is a collaboration between UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Public and Cultural Engagement, and UCL’s Bentham Project.