Some favourite PanoptiCam views

Several months ago saw the launch of the Panopticam Project, a joint UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, Bentham Project and UCL Museums project.

The Panopticam (see what we did there?) involved the installation of a webcam on top of the auto-icons box to give us a Bentham eyed view of the world. The camera takes a photo every 5 seconds (shown whenever the red light flashes on the camera) which updates the photo on the website here. At the end of each day all the photos are joined together to form a time-lapse recording of the days events, which are made available on YouTube, check out this one from 6 minutes in to see UCL Dance Soc is action. Finally every hour (at 1 minute past) the view is tweeted by @Panopticam.

It’s been going for about 3 months now, and recently the project blog decided to show some choice images from the project so far – http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/panopticam/2015/06/02/some-choice-views-from-bentham/. I thought I’d follow suit and share some of my favourites with you too.

Enjoy!

The Panopticam has been designed to encourage discussion around surveillance and how we feel being watched. It was also designed as a bit of fun, and to hopefully help us establish how many people actually visit the auto-icon (we have no idea at present). We welcome all comments / questions / feedback. Please contact me on nicholas.booth@ucl.ac.uk , or via the project twitter handle @PanoptiCam.

Nick Booth is a Teaching and Research Curator at UCL.