A recent piece in The Guardian has been playing, like an old cassette tape on loop. It explores something unsettling: a quiet erosion of imagination, especially in childhood.
Not through lack of time, but through over-structure. Over-feed. Over-control.
A world where even daydreaming feels like it’s been optimised out.
It made me think about why art matters right now. Not as decoration. Not as content. But as resistance.
This idea sits at the core of my Panopticon Series: the sense that we now live inside systems that watch, predict, and gently steer behaviour.
The original panopticon was architectural -today, it’s algorithmic.
Feeds anticipate our desires before we’ve formed them. Attention is harvested, segmented, sold back to us. And slowly, the messy, unmeasured space where imagination used to live gets flattened.
Art interrupts that loop.
When you look at a painting properly, or make something without an end goal, you step outside the system that is constantly trying to turn everything into output. You recover a bit of your own mind.
Current Panopticon Work
Data Harvest is the newest painting in my Panopticon series.
It’s still unfinished, but the idea is already clear.
I’ve borrowed the structure of American Gothic, replacing Grant Wood’s farmers with two architects of the digital age.
The church window becomes Microsoft. The weather vane becomes Apple.
The pitchfork remains …because somebody is still harvesting.
Only the crop has changed. It’s no longer wheat. It’s attention. Behaviour. Data.
The modern panopticon isn’t built from concrete.
It’s built from notifications, recommendation engines and invisible systems quietly shaping what we think, buy and believe.
I ask of you one thing. Use your imagination!
Put the phone or tablet down and use your eyes to properly look at something – drink it in, the way that David Hockney did. It’s free, and it’s essential!
See you on the other side of the Panopticon.
