Panopticon was born after Christchurch; a nationalist terrorist, on March 15, 2019, was shown in live streaming, brutally killing 50 people in a New Zealand mosque. Creating a media show at the expense of human lives, flooding social platforms with millions and millions of copies and alterations of the video uploaded through fake accounts. The video has become data, reproducible, indelible, eternal. YouTube is the primary search engine for under 25s. It is the place where high school and university students go to do research. The second most visited site in the world, preceded only by Google, which is the owner. An updated public archive with 500 hours of video per minute and watched over 1 billion hours per day. YT is the largest channel for agnotology, where you can question anything. Media manipulators "manipulate" the facility. They optimize search engines. “If you watch a video from a health organization and then follow their advice or allow autoplay to continue, within two videos you will almost always watch a conspiracy video. Because communities that are trying to shape these connections understand how to make new ones. They know connections are important, so they shape them. They know views matter, so they convince their community to watch both videos. Go to YouTube for reasonably informed information and, within a few tips, you are exposed to fringe, extremist or conspiratorial content. “ Danah Boyd, founder and president of the Data & Society Research Institute, explains.
By selecting macro-themes of the last decade (2010-2020) emigration, climate change, wars, organized crime, terrorism. I photographed the monitor of my computer with the camera, starting from the point of view of the one who experienced them firsthand, of the professional who told his reality, uploading his own contents on YT, to recreate a new point of view, mine, sitting at home. Starting from the point of view of the one who experienced them firsthand, of the professional who told his reality, from the civilian who is under a rain of bombings, to the military who resumes operations, to the mountains of Afghanistan seen from target of a sniper, by a spectator of a clandestine cockfight etc, or by what is selected by the television and the official information. These photos have become new documents, a new historiographical mapping of agnotology, new data for the database, to try to confuse it, manipulate it. Manipulating the aesthetics of YT's content with photography; the means that most of all can be contradicted and manipulated by reality. Photography has allowed me to create my archive with a paper catalog, numbered by event categories (political, social, news, science, etc.) year and who produced them and where. Detaching myself from the digital database. A work without geographic boundaries, global, where for many minutes of the video I chose the moment that could confuse the system, with a photograph that takes advantage of the ambiguous language of photography. The panopticon that was the ideal prison, conceived in the late 1700s, with a structure that allowed a single supervisor to observe (opticon) all (pan) the subjects of a prison institution without allowing them to understand if they were controlled at that time or not. Being in control, the invisible power. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the seeing-being seen couple: in the peripheral ring one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, you can see everything, without ever being seen. (Michel Foucault). A panopticon of the new millennium where we are prisoners controlled by those who control the database. I decided to end the panopticon search on 06/02/2020 when the train I was traveling on derailed and I accidentally found myself the victim of an accident, documented in a television video, and I realized at that moment that I was become the one who was filmed, the one who would enter the database, told from the point of view of a journalist, becoming the subject I had been researching for months, experiencing the feeling of being on the other side. Panopticon had to end, the circle was complete.