The Infinite Panopticon

Michael Hower

August 7 - September 12, 2026

On this Page: Artist Statement | Artist Bio | Invitation to Closing Artist Talk

Artist Statement

The Infinite Panopticon is a conceptual photography project that investigates confinement as both a physical and conceptual condition. Inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, the series reimagines abandoned prisons as sites of visual poetry, systemic critique, and unstable architectural space.

Each work functions as a visual sonnet: a structured 7×7 grid constructed from fragments of decaying carceral architecture and interrupted by a singular volta — a fragment of graffiti that acts as rupture, resistance, or revelation. Horizontal and vertical strips drawn from a fixed set of prison images are assembled through a rule-based process of repetition and variation, where each composition emerges from the same underlying system while remaining visually distinct.

What began as documentation of real sites of incarceration evolved into a broader investigation of the psychological, political, and algorithmic systems that shape perception and identity. Within the series, the grid becomes a mechanism of control while the volta operates as a breach in the illusion of order. Language interrupts image, repetition destabilizes meaning, and variation emerges within strict structural limits.

Across the project, structure is both imposed and undermined. The resulting images occupy a space between documentation and invention, where memory, surveillance, decay, and human presence continuously collapse and reform. The Infinite Panopticon invites viewers to move through architectures of confinement that are simultaneously literal and metaphorical, reflecting broader systems of isolation and instability embedded within contemporary life.

Each piece declares, in its own fractured syntax: I’ve been here.

About Michael

Michael Hower is a photographer and installation artist based in the Harrisburg area. After first working with a digital camera fourteen years ago, he became a self-taught photographer, rediscovering a sustained commitment to art through photography.

His work explores historical and social themes through images of human-made structures and altered environments shaped by absence and decay. Hower is particularly drawn to abandoned industrial sites, prisons, and graffiti-covered spaces, where deterioration and nature’s reclamation transform architecture into records of collective memory and lived experience.

Through photography and installation, he examines the tension between permanence and erosion, investigating how environments continue to carry traces of human presence long after they have been abandoned.