RES Features: RES 10
panOptic
Words: Sandy Hunter
The visual design collective panOptic was born in New York City in 1997 and evolved in an increasingly digitally-reliant ecosystem, a fact that the group weaves into its myriad output. The broadcast, print and visual work the collective generates, while sometimes whimsical, primarily conveys a technologically mediated worldview. Founded by then-live video mixers Gary Breslin and Zack Shuman, panOptic now includes Breslin, Kenzo Minami and Nick Fisher; longtime member Saul Metnick recently left to work with Vice Magazine.
"We started off doing event-based work and then slowly moved into TV with idents for Japanese television," explains Breslin. "MTV saw those and liked them and then it was all inertia. Once people figured out we could do TV commercial tags, it became our bread and butter work. The whole time, though, we've considered ourselves a director's collaborative, not a post or graphics house."
PanOptic readily slathers TV spots for the likes of Coca-Cola and Reebok with revamped brandings or glitzy, eye-grabbing title and motion design. The group's short film and music video projects employ the same techniques but without the usual hesitance enforced by commercial clients. One short, Csoda Pók, is disguised as a Hungarian military industrial film detailing the workings of a combined bomb and spider-bot visual mind-control weapon. The Case of the Eidetic Child, a short created in collaboration with Breslin's old Carnegie Mellon pal Ryan McGinness, takes a benign video of kids playing and partitions it in sterile, black-and-white, with the children translated into alphanumeric silhouettes.
Feature-obscuring design elements also dominate "MF Doom," a video for New York rapper Viktor Vaughan; the artist insisted his visual identity remain hidden in the clip. panOptic processed and obscured DV footage shot by Shawn Kim and laced the video with graphics, laboratory elements and a definite comic book aesthetic. "It was about the dichotomy between 2-D and 3-D space," says Fisher. "Things appear two-dimensionally, become 3-D and go back again. As for taking key points in the lyrics and illustrating them literally, informational graphics have been a panOptic trademark since early on."
Fisher is currently finishing a 3-D pornographic cartoon ("total polymorphic perversion for three minutes straight") tentatively titled Rat's Ass. And Breslin is developing a script about an Inuit woman whose cybernetic eyes secretly dispatch corporate missives via steganography, a process employing vacant pixels in digital images to transmit encrypted codes. "There's a certain philosophy which relates to why we named ourselves panOptic, which is a prison where guards watch prisoners from all five sides," explains Breslin. "It's also a social concept: obedience through observation and vision as a form of social control." Sounds Orwellian? Sure, but no more than CNN.
