The primary visual culture of our day is defined by what is easily reproducible and shareable — memes, short-form videos, screenshots of Twitter hot takes, and slop (both AI and human made). Despite (and/or because of) this, it is nearly impossible to have a serious conversation about the state of our daily visual diet: it’s “cringe” or “pretentious” to take these things seriously. “It’s not that deep.” pannedOPTICON is a multimedia exhibition that ponders the contemporary state of our popular visual culture and how it is filtered and enforced through our fragmented society.

Starting from Michel Foucault’s ideas of the “Panopticon” — a prison design which allows unseen guards to surveil prisoners without their direct knowledge, something Foucault in 1975’s Discipline and Punish argued is an apt metaphor of postmodern society — pannedOPTICON seeks to dissect the ways in which we (often subconsciously but no less violently) enforce arbitrary codes of civility on each other and the media we consume. Terms such as “cringe”, “slop”, “low-brow”, “unserious”, “pretentious”, and “woke”, among many others, all become pejoratives aimed at anything from ironic shitposts to genuine expressions of identity, with the aim being the enforcement of an undefined code of conduct and the ridicule of anything deemed outside of these arbitrary confines. In the pannedOPTICON, anything and everything is subject to the scrutiny of a formless, ever-changing mob.

Photo Album