Mass-Surveillance Information Processing, Storage and Feedback Facility

Thesis Statement

My thesis is a metaphorical architectural exploration of power and control in society, based largely on the later writings of Michel Foucault, from where the term governmentality appears.

Research

The studio theme pointed towards issues of control in society from the outset. From initial broader reading of Neitzsche's Will to Power, Plato's Republic and the Genesis account of the fall of man, the project quickly converged on the connection between the control of the self and control in society; such as Foucault speaks specifically about.

Contextual Fiction

The first point of departure was to create a graphic novel which, informed by analytical diagramming of relevant philosophical ideas, generated a plausible context wherein surveillance could be taken to the extreme, thereby facilitating the maximum implementation of governmentality, or institutional discipline. It was intentional to avoid the "panopticon" prosaism due to its visual fixation - modern surveillance extends far beyond the ocular.

Check here for the graphic novel images.

Architectural Intervention

“[Discipline] cannot be identified with any one institution or apparatus precisely because it is a type of power, a technology, that traverses every kind of apparatus or institution linking them, prolonging them and making them converge and function in a new way.”
[from Foucault by Gilles Deleuze, Sean Hand transl.]

The architecture attempts to embody the very thing Deleuze would seem to imply only exists metaphysically. Employing real human brains to store, process and feed back all of society's information within a self sufficient, self sustainable and semi-organic hive, the intervention is set against the backdrop of a ruined cathedral in Coventry, symbolic of the former dominative orders of power as both a church and a significant WWII bomb site. Despite a significant rebuilding program over all other bomb sites in Coventry, the Cathedral is unique in its maintained ruined state, kept as a memory and foundation of what was before - the intervention builds over and onto this, suggesting that modern forms of democratic power have overthrown medieval theocracy.

Whilst highlighting western society's worship of knowledge alongside the technological convergence of machine and flesh, the project's main aim is to ask the question of whether we are free, and whether we can be.