Taken from Michel Foucault's "Panopticism"

Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

To begin with, this made it possible - as a negative effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64).

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

'Aural Spaces from Prehistory to the Present' from Blesser and Salter's "Spaces speak, are you listening?"

Acoustic Archaeologists Interpret Ancient Spaces
Archaeologists and anthropologists convincingly argue that sacred caves, as sites of mystical experience where ancient rituals were performed, constituted a special shamanic cosmos.

The way in which each individual cave was structured and decorated was a unique result of the interactions of four elements: the topography of the cave, its passages, and the chambers; the universal functioning of the human nervous system and, in particular, how it behaves in altered states; the social conditions, cosmologies, and religious beliefs of the different times at which a cave was used; and lastly, the catalyst - the ways in which individual people and groups of people exploited and manipulated all of these elements for their own purposes. (Clottes and Lewis-Wiliams, 1996)

The cave wall paintings at Altamaira, dating from the Upper Paleolithic period some 20,000 years ago and discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, shifted our conception of paleolithic humans, who would no longer be labeled as "primitive." Indeed, the Altamira cave has been called the "Sistine Chapel of Quatemary art" (Beltrain, 1998) With their limited tools and materials, Stone Age artists created works of art that modern painters can only envy. Picasso himself has been quoted saying that  "not one of us could paint like that." Later, in the twentieth century, several thousand sites with wall art were discovered in hundreds of countries; some  in eastern Germany have been dated as fare back as 300,000 years ago. David Coulson and Alec Campbell (2001) estimate that there are perhaps a million cave art images in southern Africa alone. Although, as evidenced by the written reports of the Chinese philosopher Hanfei-tzu, 2,300 years ago, cave art is not a recent discovery (Bahn 1988), only recently has it become a prominent contributor to our understanding of human nature and the origins of civilization. Clearly, prehistoric humans were artistically sophisticated.

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Steven J. Waller (1993), a pioneer of acoustic archaeology, suggested that the paleolithic art found in the caves of Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume was influenced by the acoustic character of the chambers in which it was created. Pictures of bulls, bison, and deer were more likely to be found in chambers with strong echoes, spaces whose acoustics created percussive sounds similar to the hoofbeats of a stampeding herd. In contrast, acoustically silent chambers are more likely to contain drawings of felines. Cave art may well have incorporated echos as supernatural phenomenon that brought life into visual images. Waller and others speculate that multisensory art was part of the hunters' rituals to summon game. Extensive observations of prehistoric sites support the notion that the subjects of cave wall pictures and the acoustics of their locations were deliberately related. After having personally studied over 150 sites around the world, Waller (2002) observed that pictures of animals whose movements generated loud sounds were frequently place in spaces having enhanced echoes resonances, and reverberation. When such spaces are excited by sound, the animal portraits seem to come aurally alive.

The concept of a cave wall surface as a veil that separates the spirit world from that of ordinary mortals is evident in South African rock painting (Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1990. In this regard, borrowing from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871), Waller (2001) has advanced a compelling theory about the aural perception of echoes in caves. Just as Alice, when viewing a reflection in a mirror, felt she was seeing another world behind the mirror's surface so early humans, when exposed to echoes (sound reflection) in a cave, would have felt they were hearing the sounds or even voices of spirits from a world beyond the cave wall.

Aside from echoes, numerous other acoustic attributes would have been experienced within caves. Sonic "hot spots", regions of resonances where certain frequencies are amplified, also have also been correlated with cave wall images. Similarly, Michel Dauvois and Xavier Boutillon (1990) found a relationship between cave art and lithophones, natural stalactites and stalagmites that produce marimba-like sounds. Indeed, any object or space with a strong resonance had the ability to acquire spiritual meaning.

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Extending this hypothesis to more complex prehistoric monuments in Scotland, Aaron Watson and David Keating (1999) observed a wide range of acoustic attributes in the chambers of these monuments that could have had social and religious meaning. At different frequencies, sounds appeared to originate form different locations, and in some cases, the seemed to come from inside the heads of the listeners. Small head motions changed the perceived pitch and intensity. Listeners within the chamber could detect the approach of others from the acoustic disturbance their bodies made as they moved through long passageways. At certain locations inside a chamber, listeners would hear unexpected tremolos, periodic changes in the intensity of sounds; their speech would acquire an unusual quality, often becoming unintelligible. Watson and Keating explored the acoustical properties of these spaces using musical instruments that might have existed at the time, in effect, re-creating their speculative concept of early soundscapes. Curiously, the long passageways combined with a large enclosed blouse produced a Helmholtz resonator, an acoustic structure that amplifies narrow bands of frequencies, in this case at about 4Hz, well below the lower limit of audibility. Rhythmic drumming would have excited a Helmholtz resonance at this frequency strong enough to be felt. Such infrasounds have been associated with otherworldly experiences and, if sufficiently intense, produce discomfort, disorientation, and sensory distortion.

From 'Strange Beginnings' in E.H. Gombarich's "The Story of Art"

We cannot hope to understand these strange beginnings of art unless we try to enter into the mind of the primitive peoples and find out what kind of experience it is which makes them think of pictures, not as something  nice to look at, but as something powerful to use. I do not think it is really so difficult to recapture this feeling. All that is needed is the will to be absolutely honest with ourselves and see whether we, too, do not retain something of the 'primitive' in us. Instead of beginning with the Ice Age, let us begin with ourselves. Suppose we take a picture of our favorite champion from today's paper - would we enjoy taking a needle and poking out the eyes? Would we feel as indifferent about it as if we poked a hole anywhere else in the paper?  I do not think so. However well I know with my waking thoughts that what I do to his picture makes no difference to my friend or hero, I still feel a vague reluctance to harm it. Somewhere there remains the absurd feeling that what one does to the picture is done to the person it represents. Now, if I am right there, if the this queer and unreasonable idea really survives, even among us, into the age of atomic power, it is perhaps less surprising that such ideas existed almost everywhere among the so-called primitive peoples. In all parts of the world medicine men or witches have tried to work magic in some such way - they have made little images of an enemy and have then pierced the heart of the wretched doll, or burnt it, and hoped that their enemy would suffer. Even the guy we burn in Britain on Guy Fawkes Day is a remnant of such a superstition. The primitives are sometimes even more vague about what is real and what is a picture. On one occasion, when a European artist made drawings of cattle in an African village, the inhabitants were distressed: "If you take them away with you, what are we to live on?"

E.H. Grombrich The Story of Art

 

Goddess, Mural painting from the Tetitla apartment complex at Teotihuacan, Mexico, 650-750 CE. Pigments over clay and plaster

Looking back is a head

"History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments. It is never stilled. It is ever in movement, like the generation observing it. Its totality cannot be embraced: History bares itself only in facets, which fluctuate with the vantage point of the observer.
Facts may occasionally be bridled within a date or a name, but not their more complex significance. The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. That is why the writing of history has less to do with the facts as such than with their relations."

 - Siegfried Giedion "Mechanization Takes Command"