In order to understand the surrounding you are located in one option is to first explore Google Earth View, another way is to climb on the roof to actually discover these higher surfaces in real life. Watching down from a higher level on the base we might experience “panopticism” and / or we learn about its superstructure. Panopticism can be seen as a symbol of the disciplinary society of surveillance where superstructure talks about the ideologies that dominate a particular era.

Most influentially, the idea of the panopticon was invoked by French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his Discipline and Punish (1975), as a metaphor for modern “disciplinary” societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. This means that the Panopticon operates as a power mechanism. “On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism.”

(Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

This capture of the Y axis is part of XYZ.