Taking up the master trope of dystopian futurity articulated in Orwell's 1984, this seminar in media theory will track the paranoid logic of surveillance across a wide range of literary, philosophical, technological (photographic, cinematic, digital) and architectural manifestations. Using a comparative, historical and interdisciplinary approach we will consider surveillance as a political tactic, a narrative strategy, a theory of the subject, a spatial configuration, a mode of spectatorship, and as a key dynamic of both old and new media.