Paolo Cirio

Paolo Cirio
Born Paolo Cirio
1979
Turin, Italy
Nationality Italian
Education University of Turin
Known for Contemporary art, conceptual art, installation art, intervention art, performance art, Infiltration Art, net art, street art, tactical media, sculpture, hacktivism, culture jamming, transmedia storytelling
Notable work Obscurity,Overexposed, Daily Paywall, Global Direct, (W)orld Currency, Loophole for All, Persecuting.US, Street Ghosts, Hacking Monopolism Trilogy, Face to Facebook, Amazon Noir, Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI), P2P Gift Credit Card, Open Society Structures, Recombinant Fiction, The Big Plot, People Quote People

Paolo Cirio is a conceptual artist, hacktivist and cultural critic.

Cirio is considered one of the most noticeable Internet artist for embodying hacker ethic values, such as open access, privacy policies, and disrupting economic, legal and political models. He received a number of legal threats for his Internet art performances with practices such as hacking, piracy, leaking sensitive information, identity theft and cyber attacks.

Paolo Cirio is best known for having exposed over 200,000 Cayman Islands offshore firms with the work Loophole for All in 2013; the hacking of Facebook through publishing 1 million users on a dating website with Face to Facebook in 2011; the stealing 60000 financial news with Daily Paywall in 2014 and of e-books from Amazon.com with Amazon Noir in 2006; defrauding Google with GWEI in 2005; the obfuscation of 15 million U.S. criminal records with Obscurity in 2016. His early works include his cyber attacks against NATO and reporting on its military operations from 2001. He combines internet art with street art projects disseminated on public walls such as the unauthorized photos of U.S.Intelligence Officials found on social media with Overexposed in 2015 and images of individuals found on Google Street View with Street Ghosts an ongoing project since 2012.

2001-2004

In 2002, Cirio staged his first international media disturbance called Anti-Nato Day, considered an act of Hacktivism. It took on the shape of a virtual sit-in (DDoS attack) in the NATO website through a Flash Player script. The Canadian Department of National Defence investigated the action[1] and the Eisenhower Institute used it as a case study to identify future vulnerabilities in space security.[2] Cirio promoted the action through an anti-war web portal called StopTheNato.org, which he launched in 2001 and updated periodically until 2006.

In 2004, Cirio joined the Illegal Art Show network, which organized street art happenings in Italy in line with the Temporary Autonomous Zone-philosophy. They occupied public spaces and invited artists to create artwork. Cirio created several street art street art pieces [3] and organized three such events independently: two in Turin in 2004 and a third in London in 2005 .

2005 - 2007

In 2005, Cirio worked on the project Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) in conjunction with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen. This project questioned the information monopoly of Google and its revenue model. Cirio hacked Google's AdSense service by creating internet bots generating a click fraud in order to buy Google's share with its own money stolen through the fraudulent scheme. In an attempt to stop the project, Google sent a cease and desist letter to the artists.

Face to Facebook, Amazon Noir and Google Will Eat Itself together form the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy. [4][5]

In 2006, to criticize the abuse of copyright laws for the protection of digital content, Cirio created the project Amazon Noir in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen in 2006. He eluded the protection from Amazon.com with internet bots using the front door of the "search inside" service. He scraped complete texts of books, reassembled them into PDF files and illegally redistributed them for free. The company refused to comment on the action.[6]

2008 - 2010

Between 2008 and 2010, Cirio worked on experimental storytelling which involves actors and audiences for presenting real facts, issues and data through fictional stories across multiple media platforms. He called this technique of fiction [7] "Recombinant Fiction." This socially engaged genre of transmedia storytelling has resulted in two projects: Drowning NYC (2010) and The Big Plot (2009). Cirio has presented his theories and related projects at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, and the Rotterdam Film Festival . Cirio has developed an in-depth workshop program, entitled Tactical Transmedia Fiction, that he leads internationally.

In 2010, in reaction to the late-2000s financial crisis, Cirio created the piece P2P Gift Credit Card - Gift Finance. Cirio issued thousands of counterfeited illicit VISA credit cards[8] in order to design a visionary monetary policy, named "Gift Finance", which is meant to be a participatory and interest-free basic income guarantee system.[9] Cirio has presented numerous lectures about his theories on critical finance and Gift Finance. In 2012, he was invited to curate a panel about alternative economic models for Creative Destruction, an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program that addressed the economic recession and the related Occupy Wall Street protests.

2011 - 2012

Since 2011, Cirio has been addressing the cultural shift and mainstream media attention toward popular perceptions of privacy and ownership of public and personal information, with the projects Street Ghosts, Persecuting.US and Face to Facebook. The methodology used to create these artworks was eventually formalized in a series called Anti-Social Sculptures .

In 2011, Cirio created Face to Facebook with Alessandro Ludovico. For this piece, Cirio scraped one million Facebook profiles, filtered them with facial recognition software, and published 250000 of them onto Lovely-Faces.com, a mock dating website designed by Cirio, with the profiles sorted according to facial expressions. This resulted in eleven lawsuit threats, five death threats, and four cease and desist letters from Facebook. Within a few days, the project was covered by more than a thousand media outlets from around the world, including CNN,[10] Apple Daily, Fox News, Tagesschau, Der Spiegel, USA Today, The Independent, Haaretz, and The Age.

With the Street Ghosts project in 2012, Cirio recontextualized photos of individuals found on Google Street View, by printing and posting life-sized pictures of people in the exact locations where they were photographed. The posters were wheatpasted on the walls of public buildings without authorization. These interventions took place in public spaces of several major cities, including London, Berlin, and New York. The project generated worldwide media attention, and was also featured in specialist magazines devoted to architecture, design, art, and photography.

Also in 2012, his web project Persecuting.US profiled the political affiliations of over one million Americans who used Twitter during the months leading up to the United States presidential election of 2012. Privately stealing and then sifting through data from Twitter, Cirio algorithmically determined users’ political affiliations. All of their information can be found on Persecuting.us . In 2015, the work was featured at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in relation to Global surveillance disclosures.

2013 - 2014

In 2013, Cirio investigated offshore financial systems with the project Loophole for All. The project made public the list of all the companies registered in the Cayman Islands for the first time, exposing tax evasion practices by counterfeiting Certificate of Incorporation documents. This information was published on the website Loophole4All.com, engaging international participation through selling the real identities of anonymous Cayman companies for 99 cents; this elicited reactions from Cayman authorities and global banks as well as legal threats by multinationals companies, international law firms, and local Cayman businesses.[11] After three weeks of selling conceptual and subversive artworks in the form of limited editions of firms’ identities, PayPal suspended the account, claiming the sales activity was in violation of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy.[12][13] The performance generated national and international media attention. Loophole for All has been exhibited in museums such as the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and CCC Strozzina in Florence. In 2014 the Loophole for All project won the Golden Nica, first prize of Prix Ars Electronica.

In 2014, Cirio created the Global Direct project, a creative political philosophy that the artist outlined for worldwide participatory democracy within the potentials offered by the Internet. To illustrate the conceptual work the artist drew a series of fifteen Organizational chart to inspire values and functions for a global and participatory society. The fifteen diagrams of Global Direct were informed by the artist’s research into the social science of ancient, contemporary, and emergent democracy.

In 2014 Cirio created Daily Paywall by hacking the paywall of The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Economist. Through his paid subscriptions and Scripting language hack, he obtained over 60,000 news articles published during the course of 2014. The pay-per-view content was available for free on the website DailyPaywall.com and the artist proposed to pay people to read featured financial articles for the sake of general public awareness . Cirio conceived a provocative sharing economy model, where social and exploitative crowdsource practices were put in place to allow and incentivize people to access information on global economic matters. Using this system, readers were able to earn money for every quiz they correctly completed and journalists were able to claim compensation for their work. Everyone could donate any amount to crowdfund the system. After a few days, the ISP hosting DailyPaywall.com disabled the site after receiving complaints of international Copyright infringement from Pearson PLC, the largest education and publisher company in the world and owner of the Financial Times and The Economist. Also The Wall Street Journal proceeded to terminate the artist’s subscription due to a violation of their Terms of Service.[14] The entire artistic act was pre-scripted as a performance for illustrating critical issues on the Information economy that Cirio outlined within the launch of the project .

2015 - 2016

During the spring of 2015 Cirio conducted the street art campaign OVEREXPOSED concerning the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s global surveillance disclosures. He disseminated on public walls social media photos of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials of NSA, CIA and FBI, who were accountable for political measures or advocacy for unconstitutional surveillance and espionage programs. The photos, mostly selfies from Facebook and Twitter accounts of civilians, were rendered with a particular technique called High Definition Stencils invented by the artist for the street art campaign that took place in NYC, London, Berlin and Paris between April and May 2015. The intervention generated media coverage and public interest internationally [15] and particularly in Germany [16] [17][18][19] in connection to the German Parliamentary Committee investigating the NSA spying scandal.

In 2016, Cirio created the project Obscurity in which he obfuscated over 10 million online mugshots and the criminal records of victims of mass incarceration in United States. The project addressed the unregulated mug shot publishing industry that anonymous internet companies exploit in order to shame and blackmail people who have been arrested in the U.S. regardless of their charges and trial verdicts. Cirio cloned more than six mugshot websites and blurred millions of mugshots and shuffled names listed. In response he received support from mugshot extortion victims and was subject to a legal threat from US Data ltd., a Texan firm owning a few mugshot websites. With Obscurity , Cirio questioned the problematic Right to Be Forgotten law, which has been opposed by major search engine companies in the U.S. Ultimately, to point out the accountability of search engines in exposing personal sensitive information, Cirio designed the campaign Right2Remove.us to introduce a privacy policy adapting the Right to Be Forgotten law to the United States. With the Right to Remove policy, Cirio suggested types of sensitive personal data that should be removed from online search results to protect specific categories of vulnerable individuals.


Cirio has also collaborated also with various artists and collectives, such as RTMark, Stewart Home and Bruce Sterling. In addition, he was part of the Italian net.art collective [epidemiC].[20]

List of works

Awards

Selected awards include:

Notes

  1. ↑ IWS INFOCON (30 May 2002). "OCIPEP Daily Brief Number: DOB02-071". The Information Warfare Site.
  2. ↑ Eisenhower Institute (2004). Space Security 2013. Washington, D.C,: Eisenhower Institute. p. 159. ISBN 0920231365.
  3. ↑ Ullrich, Andreas (2006). International Sticker Award. Berlin: Wildsmile Studios. ISBN 978-3-89955-151-8.
  4. ↑ Cantz, Hatje (2011). ORIGIN. Linz: Ars Electronica. p. 168. ISBN 9783775731805.
  5. ↑ Cirio, Paolo and Alessandro Ludovicio. 2013. The hacking monopolism trilogy. ISEA International. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9673.
  6. ↑ Transcript from the lecture delivered at the University Paris 8 on 4 January 2012.
  7. ↑ Campanini, Cristiana (2010). Antologia della webletteratura. Italy: Il Foglio Letterario. ISBN 9788876062643.
  8. ↑ Lechner, Marie (2011-05-07). "Credit Revolver". Libération. p. 10.
  9. ↑ Tatiana, Bazzichelli (2011-04-15). "When stealing becomes art". DigiCult.it. p. 1.
  10. ↑ Allsop, Laura (2011-02-11). "Art 'hacktivists' take on Facebook". CNN. p. 1.
  11. ↑ Paolo Cirio (2015). Loophole4All.com by Paolo Cirio in Manchester at FutureEverything 2015 - Loophole for All. Manchester: FutureEverything. Retrieved 2015-02-26.
  12. ↑ Laura Flanders (April 15, 2013). "Tax Loopholes for All!". The Nation.
  13. ↑ Yanyan Huang (January 7, 2014). "Paolo Cirio Discovers a Tax Loophole for All". The Wild. Archived from the original on 9 February 2014.
  14. ↑ Paolo Cirio (2015). FutureEverything 2015: Paolo Cirio. Manchester: FutureEverything. Retrieved 2015-04-26.
  15. ↑ "Italian 'Banksy' exposes 'masterminds of spying' in street art campaign". Russia Today. 2015-07-12. p. 10.
  16. ↑ Beitzer, Hannah (2015-05-23). "Geheimdienst-Chefs ganz privat - und plötzlich öffentlich". Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
  17. ↑ Feiler, Hannah (2015-05-22). "Die Kunst überwacht zurück". Frankfurter Allgemeine.
  18. ↑ "Wir überwachen zurück!". Die Zeit. 2015-05-22.
  19. ↑ "Künstler plakatiert Fotos von Geheimdienst-Chefs in Berlin". Der Tagesspiegel. 2015-05-22.
  20. ↑ Brouwer, Joke, and Arjen Mulder. 2007. Interact or die!: Dutch Electronic Art festival 2007. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij NAi.
  21. ↑ "Paolo Cirio | eyebeam.org". eyebeam.org. Retrieved 2016-01-28.

Further Reading

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