Supervision The aim of the Supervision project is to build an information resource for emerging visual artists on the Internet, which provides a range of services that encourages emerging artists to network , promote themselves, and develop an art community in a non restricting interdependant fashion, outside of the Institution.

The second aim is to foster a new group of collectors who wish to support emerging artists and access the work of recent graduates, which may otherwise be dificult to locate.

Concept Supervision references 'prisons' to question the function of Institutions in art, such as the role of galleries and art schools.

Issues of power and control in Institutions are investigated by basing the design of the website on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon Principle (1787), where a close circuited panopticon interface houses prison inmates. Serving as prison cells and as a surveillance apparatus; this interface is set up as a prelude to the development of this website, inside of which each artist becomes an inmate who inhabits their own cell (in which their portfolio is housed).
The website furthers this idea of a central surveillance principle, and each part of the site is observable as if from a center core, through the use of frames and framsets.

The idea of the Panoptican was to enforce behaviour or sense of control. 'The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of the distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.)
The structural drawings and graphics on the website site are derived from an Iridology chart, which is an architectural 'map' of the Iris, showing how parts of the Iris correspond to parts of the body.
The 'eye' itself is another obvious reference to issues of power and control. One is reminded of 'big brother is watching you', CCTV cameras, bureaucracy, state control, and ultimately again, the role of the Institution. S.V. is about how and where an artist finds a place inside of that system, like that of a convict inside the panoptican, or perhaps that of Kafka's 'Castle'.

The design of the site also nutures a psychological sense of the panoptican. The visitor experiences an unclear, clinical , minimal, and yet ordered and bureaucratic space, in which content is found in virtual rooms of the panoptican, and navigating feels uneasy and intrusive. The use of frame sets creates a birds eye view for the visitor, yet restrains navigation to stict corridors, passages, and end points of small scale rooms, inside of a large background of whiteness , and beyond which the entire world wide web exists and continues.

There are references throughout the site to Institutionalism, such as the claim to being 'state owned' and being 'designed to monitor and document'. The graphics are bare essentials, light faded skeletal lines which operate as walls and virtually no accompanying text to assist navigation. Indeed, like a labryinth, the only way to get around inside it is to become familiar with its patterns and mechanisms by frequent visits. One also feels, as one does in a labyrinth, that one is being tested and must pass that test., and wonders at the same time if they are being watched. This references further issues of control and observation as the use of more and more tools to track flows of information on the Internet become apparant. Supervision, through its geometric and ordered aesthetic, succeeds in referencing the possiblility of something much larger and more sinister behind it.

The irony of using the 'prison' as an aesthetic vehicle is apparent by having to log onto the Internet to navigate it.

Creating a structure that professess control and containment inside of a medium that is essentially limitless and uncontrollable is an absurdity, but does question the potential of new technology to create a new freedom for its users, in this case emerging artists. Conversely, when the existing power structures and Institutions dominate and control it, it easily becomes yet another tool used in the same linear way. Many businesses that have a 'website' are good examples of this, where literal translations of existing systems onto the Internet not only fail, but more importantly undermine and fail to recognise the possibilities of the internet on a broader more fundamental level.

The continuing development of S.V hopes to facilitate a platorm and provide a context for emerging visual artists to develop and network inside of the institutions in which they operate, and the electronic world in which pressure to exist is growing.

S.V is run by artists, for artists, for new art and for a new public. Any inquiries please use discussion room or contact S.V directly.