Data as the Contemporary Panopticon: A Look Through Shu Lea Cheang’s ‘3x3x6’
The work, that expanded over various rooms of the 16thcentury prison Palazzo delle Prigioni, touches upon the criminalization of non-conforming sexualities and contemporary uses of surveillance techniques.
The installation compromised ten videos. Each of them centered around a character that was convicted for sexual misconduct. It stretched from Casanova, who was imprisoned at the specific site, to Sade or Foucault. They are presented in subverted ‘counter-historical’ videos that deconstructed the visual and legal hegemonies and demonstrate how norms are created on sexuality and gender.
Michel Foucault was imprisoned in Poland because of his homosexuality. A prolific writer, he did not only lay the basis of surveillance studies with Discipline and Punish (1975), but he also paved the way for queer theory with The History of Sexuality (1976).
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that power and control are gained solely by observing someone. He illustrates this through the ‘panopticon’, an architectural prison concept designed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century that would allow a guard to watch over all inmates from one specific point. Unknowing when the prisoners are being surveilled, they would adapt their behavior at all times.
For Foucault, modern-day Western civilizations are disciplinary societies with the concept of the panopticon being used throughout institutions such as prisons, schools, factories, hospitals and the military. Watching over individuals with the use of scientific knowledge turns the individuals into ‘docile bodies’ that are easier to control, discipline, normalize and punish.
Building on the Foucauldian notion of panopticism, Gilles Deleuze anticipated the expansion of surveillance through data in Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990). He noticed a shift from Foucault’s ‘disciplinary societies’ to what he named ‘societies of control’ that were made possible through data collection.
In 3x3x6, Cheang installed facial recognition cameras at the entrance of her installation to capture the visitors’ faces. They are projected in a later room, the images are altered in an aesthetic way. Cheang underlines the ethical aspect of capturing someone’s face and identity and the opaque and subjective uses of them. She also hacks the technology by using the faces for aesthetic purposes instead of domination.
In the final room of the installation, the visitors are invited to upload a video through an app of themselves dancing, supporting a girl in Iran who convicted for posting a video online where she dances. The interactivity integrates the visitors in the work, which raises their concern and empathy with the topic even further.
Probing surveillance capitalism through gender and sexuality, like Cheang does, is “fundamental at mounting a critique of surveillance” according to Kirstie Ball, scholar and co-founder of the journal ‘Surveillance and Society’. Surveillance has historically been used mainly on marginalized people such as political dissidents, slaves or sexual non-conforming people.
In History of Sexuality, Foucault parallels how scientific knowledge on sexuality — just like on criminality — enabled the modern control and domination of people through their sexuality. He notices that in the 20th century, people felt obliged to confess about their sexual life to their physicians or therapists. They thus internalized norms on sexuality and aimed to conform to them. Sexuality became a fundamental social construct for moral and identity that dates back to the Victorian era where heterosexuality was considered the norm (Foucault, 1976).
Shu Lea Cheang’s work can also be read through the writings of Paul B. Preciado. In Testo Junkie and The Countersexual Manifesto, he presents a counter-hegemonic vision of sexuality that challenges normative constructions of gender and desire. The Countersexual Manifesto proposes a radical reimagining of sexual politics based on the rejection of heteronormativity and the embrace of non-normative forms of embodiment and desire. Preciado calls for a politics of pleasure that celebrates the diversity of sexualities and resists the regulatory forces of bio-power.
With 3x3x6 Cheang challenges heteronormative norms and laws and reverses the gaze from ‘being viewed’ by technology to ‘exposing’ through it and ultimately celebrates each one’s uniqueness. By disrupting surveillance technologies, Cheang highlights the reality that “we live in a data panopticon today” while instilling a queer utopian perspective to it. With these various strategies, Cheang disrupts technology to raise awareness of contemporary surveillance techniques, she deconstructs heteronormative historical formations and invites to collectively resist and queer contemporary surveillance systems in a symbolic and poetic way.
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