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.