PANEL

PANEL originated as a performance-based, multi-channel video/sound installation, drawn from a transcript of a discussion at “Schizo Culture,” the notorious conference on schizophrenia and radical politics organized by Sylvère Lotringer at Columbia University in 1975.

The panel at “Schizo Culture” addressed the relationship between doctors, the medical profession, and torture, and coercive uses of therapy in prisons and mental institutions. Speakers included philosopher Michel Foucault, radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the Insane Liberation Front’s Howie Harp, and revolutionary prisoners’ advocate Judith Clark. PANEL re-imagines the architecture of academic and political conferences, where discourse is shaped by such things as panel, podium, microphone and stage. The installation conjures the spaces of incarceration and repressive institutionalization, then and now, and an imagined 1975 audience of intellectuals, artists, and political activists. Video projection, digital imaging, and audio re-vivify an obscure, yet potent 1970s text whose contents are eerily relevant to the torture “debates” of the present moment.

CAST 

• Darrell Moore as Michel Foucault
• Mikal Shapiro as Judy Clark
• Matthias Regan as Howie Harp
• Mark Jeffery as Ronald Laing
• Sylvère Lotringer as himself

PRODUCTION CREDITS 

• Mary Patten - Director, Producer, Editor
• Joseph Carr - Co-Producer, Compositor
• Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke - Cinematography and Lighting Design
• Mathew Paul Jinks - Audio Engineer
• Casey Puccini - Assistant Editor
• Alex Brown - Assistant Camera
• Dana Duff - Additional Cinematography (footage of Sylvère Lotringer)

Special thanks to: 

• Sylvère Lotringer and Judith Clark

Bonus Track on DVD and BluRay Discs

The “bonus track” is a re-imagining of one of several undocumented eruptions during the Schizo Culture conference. When Foucault delivered his paper on infantile sexuality (later to be developed in The History of Sexuality v. 1), he was interrupted by a member of the National Caucus of Labor Committees, a proto-fascist group associated with Lyndon LaRouche. The next morning, during the “Prisons and Asylums” panel with R.D. Laing, Judith Clark and Howie Harp, Foucault was again accused by a heckler in the audience of being in the CIA. This time he was prepared: “You're right. I am paid by the CIA. Roland Laing is paid by the CIA. Sylvère Lotringer is paid by the CIA. The only one in this room not paid by the CIA is you, since you’re paid by the KGB!” Everyone, including the man from LaRouche’s organization, burst out laughing. (Source: Sylvère Lotringer, Introduction to Schizo Culture: The Event, part of a 2-volume set published by MIT Press, 2014)