Josh Harris, though, was his own version of both Big Brothers, a watcher who was also watched. He was big on surveillance.

A dot.com entrepreneur who was the subject of the 2009 biopic documentary We Live In Public (2009), Harris set up an art-project bunker in New York called Quiet: We Live in Public. He fitted it out with about 70 cameras. People moved in and the ensuing footage was recorded.

Like a Japanese-style pod hotel, Quiet's guests were more like prisoners: they signed contracts agreeing to be filmed at all times – in bed, the toilet, the shower – and to agree to the footage becoming the property of Harris. Perhaps it was the then-looming Y2K threat that made people so willing to give up their rights but, whatever the case, Harris (and many of the residents) revelled in it.

No one was permitted to leave the Quiet bunker. Inevitably, it imploded and was shut down, with the footage of the inmates defecating, having sex and getting high falling out of their hands forever. You can see graphic snatches of it all in We Live in Public, directed by Ondi Timoner, which is itself a form of voyeurism on a failed but riveting experiment.

Some people equated the Quiet experience with Andy Warhol's Factory – and Harris himself invoked the infamous Pop-era artist when he told Timoner in the doco that Warhol was wrong thinking people wanted 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime.

"Our view is that they want it every day."

This is why the residents mostly ate up the experience, with one of them telling Timoner: "I was ready to give up everything just to be in this kooky kingdom." As it turned out, that's exactly what people were willing to do.

Was it a watershed moment? Fourteen years later, whistleblower Edward Snowden brought to world attention the extent to which routine surveillance is now practised on ordinary citizens on a far grander, far more frightening scale than the Quiet experiment.

When Snowden sent an encrypted email to documentary maker Laura Poitras​ offering to share the details of US intelligence agencies' monitoring programs, he knew how it might turn out for him – but he was willing to destroy his career and many personal freedoms in the interests of telling the truth.

He could, he told Poitras, prove the secret policy framework that had been established to enable large-scale surveillance, the extent of data collection, and the continuing infringement of basic rights. Poitras herself had suffered at the hands of authorities, being thoroughly scrutinised at every border crossing she made because her interests in probing intelligence agencies was well known. She and Snowden made a great team.

When her documentary on Snowden, Citizenfour, screened last year, it caused deep anxiety and outrage over the extent to which surveillance has wriggled into our lives.

But both these films pose a bigger question than just interrogating their specific subject matter – and that is, are we the victims in all this? Or must we bear some of the responsibility?

Orwell famously described a future of constant, intrusive surveillance in 1984, a future we suspected might one day arrive, but what we didn't suspect is something that fascinates Australian Centre for the Moving Image curator Spiro Economopoulos: not the welter of surveillance and associated technologies now engulfing us, but the willingness with which we have handed over our privacy.

Economopoulos has recently been reviewing cinema gems such as Citizenfour and We Live in Public, plus other film works that deal with the concept of surveillance and how it affects us. He's also rounded up Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Brian de Palma's Blow Out, and Michael Haneke's Hidden, among others.

On his agenda was creating a new Australian Centre for the Moving Image program on surveillance, to link with the Melbourne Festival's staging of 1984 as a theatre piece by British group Headlong this month.

"Orwell's text seems to be more relevant than ever now and it is an interesting thing to jump off from," Economopoulos says. "I specifically wanted to drill down and look at it in more detail."

Economopoulos says that for the film series, called Eyes Without a Face: Surveillance in Cinema, he looked for films that examine the psychological impact of surveillance, not only of being watched but of the act of watching. After all, with the way we use our mobile phones, we have all become instruments of surveillance – and display our recordings to varied audiences great and small, primarily through social media.

"It seems so easy for us to be tracked now, with so much of our data being retained," he says. "It is very troubling – but it is like we have handed our privacy over, in a way, rather than having it taken from us. That is what is so scary. I remember when Facebook came out I saw it as a social network you shared with friends. Now, it has become something else, where it is integrated into the workplace and there are policies around it, for example, and there is that pressure to use it as a springboard for other functions."

In her book Privacy and Surveillance, Cath Senker​ canvasses ethical debates surrounding the culture of increasing levels of surveillance, and gives a potted history of its growth. She starts with organised spy activities around Queen Elizabeth 1 during the 1580s, moves to the development of magnetic tape for recording images (1900), to Orwell's novel (1949), and to the first CCTV cameras being installed in Britain in the 1980s. After all that came the internet, face-recognition technology, biometric data recording and the social media boom we are now negotiating. Everything, it seems, is susceptible to being watched by someone, somewhere – just as the "everyman" character L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart) begins innocently watching his neighbours in Rear Window and then subtly moves into voyeurism.

Economopoulos notes the fact that cinema itself has developed a genre of surveillance-themed films – both fictional and documentary – was probably inevitable. As Sebastien Lefait writes in Surveillance on Screen, the rise of surveillance cinema in the past few decades seems to find its explanation in the spread of surveillance in contemporary societies and in the "new causes of stress and concern among the general public inevitably resulting from such a swift evolution".

But what is the "public" and who is watching whom? Hardly anything is written, created or filmed these days without invoking the name and ideas of 19th century philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. He was the creator of the panopticon – the revolutionary prison design surveillance system in which all inmates could be constantly watched from a central point by their guards. The panopticon has almost become a cliche – because, like all cliches, its heart of truth resonates with us.

But Lefait – like many of the filmmakers in ACMI's Eyes Without a Face program – charts a curious evolution in surveillance. He says the panopticon has now morphed into what he describes as the "catopticon": a non-hierarchical phenomenon where everyone watches everyone else in a variety of ways. From the random to the highly specific and targeted, surveillance is everywhere.

That's us, here and now with our sundry devices. We are all conducting, and under, surveillance.

Eyes Without a Face: Surveillance in Cinema is at ACMI, October 8-25. acmi.net.au/surveillance-in-cinema

Headlong's 1984 is at the Melbourne Festival October 16-25. festival.melbourne