The Courtroom Dock

I'm preparing a presentation "Visualising the Posthuman Courtroom" for the 7th International Conference on The Arts in Society next month in Liverpool UK. http://artsinsociety.com/conference-2012/
In the paper I focus upon the spatial implications of video conferencing. As the accused person is the main subject of my research, I'm interested in exploring the impact of video conferencing upon the courtroom structure of the custody dock. Many issues arise, including: questions of dematerialisation (refer to Linda Mulcahy, Legal architecture: justice, due process and the place of law Routledge, 2011); mobile justice; the phenomenology of courtroom architecture (refer to Juhani Pallasmaa, 'Hapticity and time' (2000) 207(1) Architectural Review); the phenomenology of screens (refer to Ingrid Richardson, 'Faces, interfaces, screens: Relational ontologies of framing, attention and distraction' (2010) 18 Transformations; and Lucas Introna and Fernando Ilharco, 'Phenomenology, screens, and the world: a journey with Husserl and Heidegger into phenomenology' (2004)  Social theory and philosophy for information systems 56); and permeability. 


I've just started writing about 'permeability', having come across the notion in Keith Farrington's 'The modern prison as total institution? Public perception versus objective reality' (1992) 38(1) Crime & Delinquency 6. He analyses Erving Goffman's 'total institutions' (see below) in a broader social context as having a range of networked connections and relationships.  He finds that prison environments are “enclosed within an identifiable-yet-permeable membrane of structures, mechanisms and policies, all of which maintain, at most, a selective and imperfect degree of separation between what exists inside of and what lies beyond prison walls.”(pp.6-7) Following this line of thought, video conferencing can be seen as adding a layer of permeability to the correctional centre, opening up opportunities for a greater level of human interaction for inmates than provided by a telephone. This is of great importance when considering inmates’ access to legal advice through video conferencing, and to the maintenance of family relationships through video family visits. Perhaps with video conferencing the correctional centre is not so totally cut-off from society as Goffman’s concept of the 'total institution' may suggest. Anyway, this is just a work in progress...


For a fascinating visualisation of docks – from cages and plexiglass to more open structures, I was pleased to find this page on the web: "Obscure Design Typologies: Courtroom Docks" http://strangeharvest.com/obscure-design-typologies-courtroom-docks

Farrington p. 6 summarises Goffman’s theory of the total institution. In note 1 p. 24 he writes “1. Goffman actually identifies several basic themes or attributes that he sees as characterizing and distinguishing the “total institution”: (a) total control over the inmate population which the administration attempts to achieve and maintain; (b) the total structuring of the inmate’s environment and activities; (c) the total submergence of the inmate’s preinstitutional entity as he or she is socialized into and forced to adjust to this environment; and (d) the total isolation and separation of the institution and its inhabitants from the larger society in which the institution resides. It is this last meaning of the total institution concept – and this last meaning only – with which the present article is concerned.” See: Erving Goffman, Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates, Anchor (Anchor Books, 1961).

Physiognomies: The portrait in the XXI century - Exhibition in Italy

Physiognomies: The portrait in the XXI century

PRIMO PIANO LIVINGALLERY (ITALY)
www.primopianogallery.com

June 2012

My Reports of Crime, Etc., Etc., video installation and Technosomatica still images are to be exhibited in this exhibition in Italy.

Video conferencing and inmates: a new observatory of the criminal body

My abstract has been accepted for presentation at the British Society of Criminology conference at the University of Portsmouth. Here's my abstract if you feel like reading it!:

Video conferencing has replaced the need for inmates to physically appear in certain criminal procedures. Transmitted from a small, remote video booth in a correctional centre, the incarcerated three-dimensional body appears virtually in the courtroom as a convenient two-dimensional indication of a body. We have moved from the corporeality of the accused person in the courtroom dock, to a real-time image of the criminal body immobilised, segregated and secured on a screen – a new observatory of humanity where dissymmetry is assured. As we seemingly enter an anti-somatic era, is the criminal body becoming obsolete? Contemporary society has an ambivalent relationship to the body where harvested bio-data is privileged over the idiosyncratic physical body. Kathryn Conrad suggests that the current move away from embodiment towards treating the body-as-information is affecting the ‘very ontology of the body’. Already there are visual substitutes that represent the criminal body, including forensic and biometric information, and now the screen-based virtual inmate video-linked from gaol, docile under the power of the state and serving the interests of the capitalist system.

This new observatory and modified visibility of the criminal is explored as a postbiological instrument of power, political technology and observation over the imprisoned body, where the inmate is reconceptualised and reduced to an isolated, inert, disembodied virtual subject. My research explores the impact of video conferencing through fieldwork involving interviews with inmates at Australian correctional centres. The resulting data will be analysed through the lens of theories of embodiment, phenomenology and critical criminology.

And I do like to consider my research filtered through my art practice; here's one image from a body of work, Technosomatica.

Prison video links

Prison video links

As I look forward to my trip to England shortly, it's interesting to see how prison video link technology is being used on the other side of the planet.

Sekula and the Body

I've been reading and writing about the accused/criminal body, seen as inherently dangerous and unsafe and distinct from the law-abiding body. Allan Sekula in his paper The Body and the Archive October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), pp. 3-64  (http://www.jstor.org/stable/778312 ) explores the photographic documentation of prisoners, and the mid-nineteenth century interest in phrenology and physiognomy. Sekula writes that both phrenology and physiognomy "shared the belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and head, bore the outward signs of inner character." (p.11). Relevant proponents of these fields included Johann Caspar Lavater and Franz Josef Gall. Photography and phrenology were eventually conjoined in 1846 when the American penal reformer and matron at Sing Sing, Eliza Farnham, sought portraits of the inmates and published Rationale of Crime and its Appropriate Treatment, Being a Treatise on Criminal Jurisprudence Considered in Relation to Cerebral Organization, New York, Appleton 1846.
Sekula refers to other nineteenth century practitioners including Cesare Lombroso, his interest in anthropological criminology, and his theory that people were born criminal ... which led me to hunt for some of Lombroso's images online. Interestingly, I found the Museo Criminologico in Rome http://www.museocriminologico.it/storia_6_uk.htm and in Turin: http://www.museounito.it/lombroso/

image from: http://sociologycriminology.wordpress.com/positive-theory-positivism/ accessed online 05/03/12

Lombroso's theories remain controversial and, not surprisingly, my online search revealed hostilities towards the Turin Museum and its collection of human remains.

The electronic frontier

...the electronic frontier is 'a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.'

Dreyfus, H.L., On the Internet (2001) Routledge p.4

I'm exploring theories of embodiment as they relate to the posthuman in the virtual realm and finding some good material in "The Body: A Reader" edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, Routledge 2005.
Does virtuality threaten the body with extinction, or does it offer new forms of embodiment and extensions of material awareness? My focus is upon the accused/criminal body.

Her Majesty's Courts Service - Information for Researchers

Her Majesty's Courts Service - Information for Researchers

Summer in London sounds like a good idea ... as well as a visit to the UK's virtual courts such as Camberwell Green Magistrates' Court, London and Medway Magistrates' Court in North Kent.