Piranesi: The Birth of a New Prison

Michel Foucault describes in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison a vision of surveillance society on the model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison designed with a guard-tower in the middle of a cylinder of cells facing the tower. The guard can essentially see all cells at all times, but the prisoners cannot know whether the guard is watching them or any other prisoner at any…