Riccardo Dogana, Panopticon, 2020

To watch, to see everything, to watch the world staying at its center. To be like God. […] But this center has no place in a traditional geography: it is the endless, wild, mysterious Big Data electronic prairies. And this is an opportunity for everyone, through the medium of screens: getting to violate (and of letting the others violate) the intimate vestibule of space and time, with a look. 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. 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. […] There is no euphoria. No easy enthusiasm, no naïve abandon. In front of such radical possibility of seeing, there would be two practicable ways: pornography or cure. Riccardo Dogana, instead, shows us a third, at the crossing of the two: witnessing. (Tommaso Di Dio)