PanOptimum, The New Global Platform

2020

Medium: Experimental multimedia animation using Mapbox Real-Time Satellite Engine, Vuplex VR live web-browser, Unity 3D 

Sound Collaboration with Reece Anderson

PanOptimum is a satire disguised as an advertisement promoting a techno-utopian new world order.

In this speculative architecture, users are stored in virtual "cells" inside a mysterious planetary-scale data platform. Each cell maps a user’s exact geographic location and digital behavior, transforming individuals into data points retrievable by networked systems. In becoming knowable through data, they are also rendered governable and optimizable subjects. Their activities are extracted, auctioned to algorithmic bidders, and reinserted into the as hyper-targeted advertisements. 

Using real-time mapping engines, immersive 3D environments, and a VR interface, the multimedia video explores grids and map as cultural techniques of control, examining the invisible violence embedded within systems of addressing and spatialization. 

The act of assigning an address—whether digital or geographic—is framed not as a neutral act of organization, but an ontological cut that reconstitutes the very thing it seeks to quantify, calculate, and contain. Partitioning space, codifying movement, identifying subjects–  a map does not merely observe and describe the world, but actively names a boundary that preconditions what is visible, actionable, and even imaginable. More than a neutral tool of representation, address systems function as cultural techniques of capture that prescribes how being is disclosed, experienced, and inhabited. 

The video examines how mapping and measuring enforce ontological control by spatializing bodies and behaviors in ways that render them legible, extractable, and subject to regulation. The piece interrogates the techno-capitalist desire that aims to render all life into addressable, trackable, and commodifiable data.