Digital light is both the subject and the medium for Jon Ippolito’s “The Panopticon Is Leaking.” This teleconference presentation at the University of Melbourne traces the historical roots of light as both a metaphor for knowledge and a means of control, and questions the relevance of this legacy for age of Internet phenomena such as Anonymous and Wikileaks.
Organized by Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer, Les Walkling, Jane Button, and Alex Gibson, March’s Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation conference includes such luminaries as curators Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul speaking on the way new and old media artists foresaw the role of contemporary visual media and light-based technologies.
Apart from activist projects like Anonymous and Wikileaks, “The Panopticon Is Leaking” explores artworks that contest the status of light as information, including Thomson & Craighead’s Light from the Future and Still Water Senior Researcher John Bell’s Octris.