Surveillance
Graduate Thesis 2022
Dewen Li
Graduate Thesis 2022 Provocations Positions Project
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Thesis Statement In the current moment of global pandemic, our lifestyles have changed dramatically from in person working environment to online collaboration platform, from massive social gathering to small groups of communication, from being closed to people to performing social distance. This sudden change causes a felling of being captivated in space and limits views of perspectives that we used to interacting with the surroundings. Before the lockdown, however, a minority group of people in our society has already been living in this situation for a lone time. They might be elders, disabled, disadvantaged, and etc,. They need a buffer zone to reintegrate back to society.
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My thesis focus on surveillance, incarceration, technology, human rights and social equity in the current era. Through research, investigation, simulation and deliberation, this project experiences architecture in an unique angle of perspective and explores new possibility of social hierarchy.
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Provocations
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Week 01 The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English Philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all
prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.
Panopticon Monitor the most prisoners with the fewest guards.
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1. The Panopticon Prison, Plan and Elevation 2. The Panopticon Prison, Interior View 1 3. The Panopticon Prison, Interior View 2
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Week 02 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occured in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punish-
ment just becuase of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the "disciplines" - new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks.
Discipline & Punish Awareness of constant surveillance creates self disciplinary behavior.
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Week 03 Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to expand the ways the built environment's relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture. The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive
legacies of racialized coercion in the United States - and follow the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present one must shift the epistemological frame elsewhere: to places, discourses, and narratives assumed to be outside of the sphere of incarceration.
Zeroes and Ones: Carceral Life In the Data World Carceral geography ripple out to everyday life under power hierarchy and technology system.
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Positions
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Week 04
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Week 05
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Private Space
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Private Space
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1. SCI_Arc Interior View 1 (Focal Length 10mm, View Angle 140) 2. SCI_Arc Interior View 2 (Focal Length 10mm, View Angle 140) 3. SCI_Arc Interior View 3 (Focal Length 3mm, View Angle 165) 4. SCI_Arc Interior View 4 (Focal Length 24mm, View Angle 85) 5. SCI_Arc Exterior View 1 (Focal Length 24mm, View Angle 85) 6. SCI_Arc Exterior View 2 (Focal Length 10mm, View Angle 140)
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Week 07 After remapping the surveillance system in SCI_Arc, my focus shifts from the public area to semi-private or private are, which will be the space between studio and the presentation hallways. Finding these posts is very easily, in the Instagram app search with the hatchtag #SCI_Arc, all the posts created by SCI_Arc
official account would be available for you to scroll. When the surveillance system focus more on the public space, the social media platform is more tend to the private space of the building, and it also counts as a way of observation and spying.
#SCI_Arc Instagram Social media fills the hole of monitoring the private space.
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1. SCI_Arc Instagram Post 1 2. SCI_Arc Instagram Post 2 3. SCI_Arc Instagram Post 3 4. SCI_Arc Instagram Post 4
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Week 08 In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire in the kitchen of a fourth-floor flat in Grenfell Tower, west London, developed into a building fire that would ultimately claim seventy-two lives. The unfolding catastrophe was captured live by hundreds of Londoners on their cameras and smartphones. Every video of the fire captured that night is a unique
piece of evidence, containing unique information. FA has collect hundred of these pieces of evidence and, using a technique known as 'projection mapping', applied those videos to an architectural model of Grenfell Tower to create a continuous '3D video' of the fire.
Forensic Architecture Universal use of smartphone creates new media for public engagement.
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1. Video Mapping on 3D Program 2. Ongoing Fire Footage by Smartphone 3. Bird Eye View on 3D Program
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Project
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Week 09 The state of being observed constatnly does not always have a bad influence. Technology applied to surveillance is rapidly developing, mobile apps such as instagram and tiktok provides new persepctives for people who want to investigate somewhere without actually being there. They are perfect for some specific groups of people who are unable to move freely but have the opportunity to explore on the internet, such as elders quarantined in home or patients in hospitals. There are also lots of artworks produced by creators for showing their imagina-
tions of the furure worlds, such as Liam Young's project Planet City. In his utopia, the human population on earth is living in one matacity where skyscrapers crowded just for housing the tremedously dense population. Urban blocks are stacking up vertically insteand of spreading flat. As the new urbanism is formed, a new way experiencing the city must be decided, which the unique perspectives of surveillance system might be the new way for architects to perceive the world in the near future.
Dark Matter / Simone Browne Surveillance vs Sousveillance
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1. Planet City, Liam Young 2. Current Trend Social Media 3. Elders Watching Phone
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Week 10 Proposals: - multifunctioal facility provided for elders or other manority groups of people who are not able to perform a healthy social interaction with others. - unique angle of perspective helps perceive and experience the building. - based on downtown LA where has one of the most power hierarchy in the current society.
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- Jeremy Benthem, the Panoticon - Michel Foucult, Discipline and Punish - Paths to Prison: On The Architecture of Carcerality - SCI_Arc, Instagram - Grenfell Tower, Forensic Architecture - Planet City, Liam Young
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Credits
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