Citizens 1 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
Expanding the top-down perspective in the Extraction series, this drawing multiplies the figure across a grid, evoking Foucault’s panopticon as a societal mechanism where the possibility of constant observation enforces internalised control, now amplified in the 21st century by digital surveillance capitalism. Palantir’s role is emblematic, with its AI-driven military software enabling drone targeting in Gaza and contract agreements with police forces, such as those in the UK (e.g., Leicestershire) and US (e.g., LAPD, ICE), facilitating predictive policing through vast data integration and secretive, asymmetrical agreements that prioritize control over privacy. Three quarters of Palantir contracts with British police forces remain undisclosed to the public.
The bodies become Shoshana Zuboff’s raw material: extracted human behaviors commodified into data for algorithmic prediction, nudging, and profit. The pavement grid encases them like a societal net, each tile a data point capturing location, clustering, movement trajectories, and temporal markers, shadows stretched by time of day revealing routines, overlaps suggesting interactions, all fodder for targeting systems that profile and preempt. Facial recognition scans from above, drones map heat signatures, AI zones are designed to classify anomalies in and around citizens behaviour, whether they are huddled sitting together, pausing, walking, running, protesting, talking, or in a state of collapse, citizens actions are isolated yet interconnected by the grid’s logic, their shadows merging and betraying, turning communal space into a site of relentless extraction where Palantir’s tools and opaque contracts exacerbate the harm by turning citizens into perpetual data subjects under unceasing, unverifiable observation.