The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century.
Riccardo Dogana gathered these dazzling flashes on the mechanical cornea of his own photographic device, without any cold attitude, letting himself down the screens our world is made of.
What he sees happen makes us feel lost, it bothers us, it fascinates us. It feels like we cannot believe in what we see; or better: we doubt its consistency. They look like hallucinations, phosphenes, fractals of a mind we are lost into. And yet, the images in this book belong to us, and are fraternal to us: we cannot but feel our full participation to it. We even think we already saw them: as if shadows stolen from our screens, déjà-vu. […]
Panopticon is a reasonable way to this violation: the diary of a man who travelled through the screens. In these images you can find one possible circumnavigation around the images the world produced and stored in the web, in the last ten years. Months long meticulous daily collection: one immersion into the monitor, deep into the vast dark abyss of the database. Entering this stream of images, feels like falling into the heart of this time of our, sensing its own murk: a darkness that somewhere, starts to move, a body that captures all the world’s light just to let some bright, quick, sticky, painful smudge shine out of it.
