OVERVIEW
Panopticon is a transmedia narrative about government surveillance. It is presented as an interactive website that combines video, still photos, social media posts and text, exploring the implications of both the Australian and Singaporean governments having increasing access to their citizens’ data.
After entering through the landing page, the viewer is presented not with linear footage, but with a spread of information across the page: Tweets, Facebook posts, news footage and more. It becomes apparent that there are two characters whose data we are seeing. Through this content, the viewer can piece together the basis of the story: there is a political protest, and a friendship between two attendees.
The audience clicks through to the next page (or “chapter”), where they’re given another spread of content, which indicates that events have progressed. As the story moves on, more intrusive content appears. While it began with publicly available data such as Facebook posts, we start seeing private emails, snippets of Skype calls, and secretly recorded footage inside one character’s house. The audience’s comfort is tested over the information they’re being made privy to, balanced against the possible reasoning for the characters being surveilled.
There is a linear narrative within the experience, but the audience finds their own way through it. The content can be consumed in any order and at any speed, framed loosely by chapters. There are rewards for exploration and interaction; a seemingly benign video of a character inside their home might turn in an unexpected direction at the end, or one screen grab of a Facebook post might link to that character’s profile with further content. A viewer might be surprised to learn how much is there if they do enough digging.
The interactive presentation of Panopticon makes the audience an active participant in the surveillance within the story. Our goal is for them to interrogate the ethics of targeted surveillance, without pushing them to one side or the other of the issue. When does national security justify spying on civilians? At what point do we forfeit our right to privacy? What are we willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe?
