What is the relationship between the archive and the surveilling gaze? Foucault’s panopticon describes a structure of power in which visibility itself becomes the mechanism of control — the watched body disciplines itself, whether or not it is being watched. The archive operates through a parallel logic: the document that records also classifies, orders, and constrains what can be known about a subject.
This paper considers what it means to work with — and against — the archive as an artistic methodology. Drawing on my own practice of “archivomancy” in The Wrong John Carroll, I ask what kinds of knowledge the archive makes possible and what kinds it forecloses. What happens when the documented subject is absent, misidentified, or speaks back through the documents?
Foucault’s Benthamite panopticon is, at its core, a machine for producing documents. The prisoner observed is also the prisoner catalogued. Surveillance produces records; records produce the subject. The archive is the panopticon’s memory — the filing cabinet in the guard tower.
The power of the archive does not rest on any single observation, but on the accumulated weight of documents: birth records, employment files, death certificates. These are not mirrors of a life but technical images in Flusser’s sense — surfaces produced by industrial processes, each carrying within them a thousand prior texts. The photograph of a grave. A payroll entry. An obituary clipped by a great-aunt and folded into a drawer.
“The archive is not a place for storing. It is a machine for producing the subject.”
My project The Wrong John Carroll begins with an archival error: I went looking for my great-grandfather and found someone else. Two men named John Carroll, both from away, both working at Sydney Steel. The document system that should distinguish them instead conflates them. This confusion is not merely an inconvenience — it is a condition of working-class archival life. The underdocumented leave behind fragments; fragments get reshuffled by researchers looking for someone else.
Rather than correcting the confusion, I chose to amplify it. I commissioned a grave etching of the wrong John Carroll. I created a hand-bound codebook linking QR codes to an online archive where anyone can ask the documents questions. I perform the role of the archivist who answers “in character,” mediating between the living researcher and the accumulated residue of a misidentified life. I call this archivomancy: divination through documents, a performative reading of what the archive produces as its subjects.
The panopticon’s power depends on the absence of reciprocal vision — the prisoner cannot see the guard. The archive enforces a similar asymmetry: the document describes the subject, but the subject cannot annotate the document. Counter-archival practices — from community memory projects to speculative reconstruction — attempt to restore this reciprocity. If I add documents to the archive, I change what the archive knows. If I misfile deliberately, I introduce noise into the surveillance record.
There is something utopian in the idea that art can serve as counter-archive: a place where the gap between the panopticon’s record and the lived life can be held open, even treasured. The QR code in the graveyard points not to an answer but to a question. Archivomancy is the practice of asking the documents what they don’t know.
Published in: Technologies of Experience — Seminar Publication, David Clark (ed.), NSCAD University, Winter 2026. “Talking About Power” panel.