In collaboration with Manchester Art Gallery and North Manchester High School for Boys I worked with a group of students who were experiencing problems in the educational mainstream. In order to negotiate a planned outcome I presented the students with a range of optical and photographic techniques, expecting them to choose one scenario to pursue. Within minutes they had exceeded days of planning and dissected each proposal to re-assemble a complex hybridisation of ideas. With first hand experience of surveillance they designed vision-dissembling headsets. Angular mirrored interiors enabled the wearer to not only see in front and behind simultaneously but also all around their own head. Showing an instinctive understanding of the issues, these devices were called ‘Paranoid Panoramas’. 

 To return the gaze of authority they made pinhole CCTV cameras and exposed images in school, the gallery and public spaces. Partly in mockery, partly in reclamation these cameras were encrusted with the urban calligraphy that defines the student's territory. The images and devices were exhibited on the top floor of North Manchester Library and some of the exposures were taken from the observatory hill in Heaton Park. Significantly both sites offer a panoramic vantage from which Manchester's lethally contested internal boundaries are invisible.