In order to further investigate the optical city the ‘Tesseract Panopticon’ pinhole camera was developed as a refinement of the ‘Heautoscopic Panopticon’. It retained the four dimensional Hypercube form to maintain its position outside of the temporal assumptions of conventional photography. However, it dispensed with the heautoscopic mirrored surface in favour of the instrumental authority of black leather, aluminium and steel. Cloaked in optical fetish it was instantly recognizable as a camera during its street surveys. With equal accommodation and wariness passers-by ducked its sentinel gaze. Its cardinal perpendicular view dissipates along lines of sight and rebounds off occluded vistas. Its advance on its predecessor is to expose a contiguous cubic net shape of film as opposed to six separate exposures. In keeping with its origins as a symbolic tool for dimensional transmutation it allows the three dimensional cubic exposure to be unfolded into a two dimensional image which in turn presents the simultaneous view of six vistas previously perpendicular to each other. However the nature of the pinhole inverts and laterally translates each image so that the adjoining sides are in an impossible orthogonal relation.
Additionally and unexpectedly the instrument generates a further, more significant, order of polarity. The term ‘Panopticon’ is a misnomer. The fields of view of each face do not converge, consequently the camera omits as much as it sees. The film net wraps around a felt covered cube to prevent light pollution between the exposures. Representing the 'void' (unknown unknowns) the cube's interior of six inward facing mirrors renders it notionally infinite. The geometric diagram of the Panopticon's scopic field reveals the void exerting itself and radiating the unseen. Although an instrumental dysfunction these radial blindnesses intangibly encompass the city's mythical inverse counterpart beyond even the illumination of the negative's radiant shadows.
