We witnesses can't escape ourselves - J.G. Ballard

So how does one approach a diversity of works, made for cinema, television and the gallery, in light of this? The condition of being a subject of surveillance is clearly omnipresent and television has happily hooked itself into what might be called the 'panoptical imaginary'. Consider the extraordinary success and popularity of 'Reality TV' shows such as Big Brother (the British equivalent of Loft Story), for whose first series more people voted than did in recent elections in the UK (to which fact nothing, and everything, need be added). Surveillance is a given condition of debates about law, order and social control. All of which is only to state the obvious, to invoke a national variation on a global theme. So much so, in fact, that between October 2001 and February 2002 the Zentrum fur Kust und Media (ZKM) in Karslruhe, Germany devoted a major exhibition to the subject: CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. The catalogue that accompanied the show has been an invaluable companion in researching this letter and must surely stand as a key work of reference on the subject if one begins to approach surveillance not only as a means of externally-imposed social control but also as an increasingly internalised condition. From which it's only a short step to asking: what are the conditions of this internalised self-surveillance? What are its aesthetics and its rhetorics as visible in the UK? One place to start from is the assertion made by Ursula Frohne in her essay for the exhibition catalogue: “The unforeseen success of docu-soaps such as Big Brother indicates that we are on the threshold of a transition from the bureaucratic-institutional tactics of surveillance to the medially-staged spectacle of the individual's total surrender to the media's regime of the gaze.” (3) Cinema, and other moving-image art forms, occupy a privileged position in this transition, existing between the bureaucratic-institutional and the medially-staged spectacle and are able to recruit, represent and possibly even détourne the apparatus by which internalisation takes place. In so doing, certain works provide valuable meditations on the aesthetics and rhetorics of the condition of internalised surveillance.

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/letter_london.html