me, the black-box

The diagnosis of the relapse of an advanced stage IV Hodgkin's lymphoma allowed me to understand the vital importance of the photographic image. An analysis on the human figure through the use of the diagnostic device to which my body is fed.

The diagnosis, after ten years, of the relapse of an advanced stage IV Hodgkin's lymphoma has allowed me to see the vital importance of photography, which has now also become a tool of treatment for me. The course of the disease and therapy I face in these months have been an inescapable invitation to think about the forced, but necessary, reversal that my practice has undergone: for the first time I have directed my gaze toward myself, or rather, within myself.

Referring back to Flusser's theories, I become input thrown in and chewed up by an endless series of computer algorithms that constitute the "meta-bolism" of a black box represented by the diagnostic instrumentation (ultrasound, X-ray, CT, PET) with which I interface daily. I become raw material for complex electronic processing that could be imagined absurdly as the semi-free interpretation of the apparatus, whose specific internal workings and algorithmic calculations (its thinking) are only predictable but not manageable or controllable, as we delude ourselves into thinking we can.

Through various software programs I scrutinized and explored diagnoses, pure and unresolved technical images created by an AI if not subject to human interpretation. I then become an observer and explorer of a body immersed in a virtual and fictitious world. This operation over time has led me to the conclusion that I myself am a black box capable of producing anomalies, masses, inconsistencies, diagnosable results that are a consequential response, processed by means of "biological algorithms", to a series of inputs sent by an external world that every day alters and contaminates intimate human nature. Mine.