David Schafer, Pantheon, 2021
Aluminum I-beams, steel, hardware, chain, neon, transformer, speakers, audio playback, printed signage on aluminum, fiberglass seating
8’ x 9’ x 12’, Audio: 30:00
Pantheon explores how human relations and social structures are mediated through signs. The installation integrates seating, chains, neon lighting, and a layered soundscape, transforming viewers into active participants within its theatrical framework. The signs are derived from the logos of companies—from banks, to companies in the oil and gas, fast food, fashion, media, entertainment, military, credit card, and automotive industries. These logos have been reconstructed and filtered reducing them to a morphology of color and code. This code is a form of socialization, and generates a formal set of social relations analogous to money.
Pantheon is a relational structure, a theater of capitalism where corporations and code replace deities and gods. According to Gilles Deleuze, societies are regimes of coding that aim to bring about fixed modes of existing. For Deleuze, capitalism is a regime of decoding and leads to a perpetual sense of novelty and innovation, since coded flows are continually being turned into commodities through this process.
In the writing of Franco Berardi, semiocapitalism is a form of capitalism in which signs, symbols, and information—not just material goods—become central to economic production and value. Berardi’s work emphasizes the role of immaterial labor, ideas, and communication, and the commodification of cultural and symbolic elements in driving economic processes. Economic value is increasingly tied to signs, brands, and the emotional or symbolic resonance of products rather than their material utility. In semiocapitalism, individuals internalize market logic, transforming personal identity and social interactions into performances or commodities.
Varying lengths of heavy chain drape down across the interior structure of Pantheon. Their presence has associations to enslavement and are activated by the participants. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s series of etchings, Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), created in the mid-18th century, depict vast labyrinthine prisons filled with monumental staircases, arches, chains, and machinery. In his analysis of these etchings, Michel Foucault linked them to themes of surveillance, power, and discipline. For Foucault, such architecture plays a key role in disciplining individuals, especially in prisons, schools, and asylums, evoking a sense of inescapable control. These spaces are not just physically confining but psychologically overwhelming, much like the Panopticon, which Foucault describes as a prison designed to make its inmates feel permanently observed, and thus self-disciplined.
Pantheon suggests that we may be trapped within a system too large to escape or fully comprehend, a world of semiocapitalist confinement in which institutions ensure compliance through invisible yet omnipresent structures.