In his will, Jeremy Bentham, UCL's "spiritual founder", requested that after his death, his body be displayed in public, in what he called an "Auto-Icon". His preserved skeleton continues to gaze upon the university in a glass cabinet. Since 2013, a webcam (PanoptiCam) has been installed on the top of the Auto-Icon watching the reaction of passers-by looking at Jeremy's remains, and broadcasting the images via Twitter and Youtube.
Dr Rodrigo Firmino, Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL Urban Laboratory, has been pursuing a project watching Jeremy Bentham watching him watching Jeremy, in an extension of his research interests on cameras being used to watch public spaces.
Rodrigo is paying Jeremy a visit every weekday, so that they can "talk" about surveillance. Every time, he shows Jeremy a different sentence - whilst also in the realisation that he himself has become a lab rat within the PanoptiCam project itself. Who is watching whom?
Rodrigo is inviting suggestions for messages to display to Jeremy - you can send an idea here.
PanoptiCam is a project from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Public and Cultural Engagement, and UCL's Bentham Project.
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