Paolo Cirio

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

Cirio's work embodies hacker ethics, such as open access, privacy policies, and the critique of economic, legal, and political models.

He received a number of legal threats for his Internet art performances, including practices such as hacking, piracy, leaking sensitive information, identity theft, and cyber attacks.

Cirio promoted the action through an anti-war web portal called StopTheNato.org, which he launched in 2001 and updated periodically until 2006.

In 2002, Cirio's first international action was called Anti-NATO Day.

As an act of Hacktivism he staged a virtual sit-in (DDoS attack) in the NATO website through a Flash Player script.

The Canadian Department of National Defence investigated the action and the Eisenhower Institute used it as a case study to identify future vulnerabilities in space security.

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 and show artworks during the events.

Cirio created several street art pieces and organized three such events independently: two in Turin in 2004 and a third in London in 2005.

In 2005, Cirio hacked Google's AdSense service by creating internet bots for a click fraud in order to buy Google's shares with its own money.

In an attempt to stop the project, Google sent a cease and desist letter to the artists mentioning legal consequences for the project. Cirio worked on the project Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) in conjunction with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen.

The project questioned the information monopoly of Google and its revenue model.

In 2006 he eluded Amazon.com's protections with internet bots exploiting a vulnerability of the "search inside" service.

He scraped complete texts of books, reassembled them into PDF files, and redistributed them for free.

The company refused to comment on the action.

In collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen, Cirio created the project Amazon Noir to criticize the abuse of copyright laws for digital content misappropriated by private corporations.

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

Between 2008 and 2010, Cirio worked on experimental storytelling, involving actors and audiences to present real facts and issues through fictional stories across multiple media platforms.

He called this technique of documentary fiction "Recombinant Fiction."

This socially engaged genre of transmedia storytelling has resulted in two projects: Drowning NYC (2010) and The Big Plot (2009).

In 2010, in reaction to the late-2000s financial crisis, Cirio created the piece P2P Gift Credit Card - Gift Finance.

Cirio issued thousands of illicit VISA credit cards in order to design a creative monetary policy, named "Gift Finance", which is a participatory and interest-free basic income guarantee system.

In the following years, he presented the projects in relation to the economic recession and the related Occupy Wall Street protests.

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 collected one million Facebook profiles, filtered them with artificial intelligence for facial recognition software, and published 250,000 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 legal letters from Facebook.

The legal repercussions were integrated into the artwork as a component part of a creative project within an expanded field.

Within a few days, the project was covered by over a thousand media outlets from around the world including CNN, Fox News, Tagesschau, and Apple Daily.

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.

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 2012 United States presidential election.

Cirio appropriated the data and algorithmically determined users’ political affiliations to raise awareness on voter profiling and polarization in social bubbles that can be targeted for political manipulation.

Paolo Cirio is 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 theft of 60,000 financial news articles with Daily Paywall in 2014 and of e-books from Amazon.com with Amazon Noir in 2006; defrauding Google with GWEI in 2005; and the obfuscation of 15 million U.S. criminal records with Obscurity in 2016; exposing over 20,000 patents of technology enabling social manipulation in 2018.

Paolo Cirio has won a number of awards, including the Golden Nica first prize at Ars Electronica in 2014; the Eyebeam Fellowship in 2012; and the Transmediale second prize 2008, among others.

Cirio has exhibited in international museums and institutions, he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading universities, and his artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets worldwide.

Recently, in 2020, he pirated over 100,000 Sotheby’s auction records in Derivatives and he attempted to profile 4000 French police officers with facial recognition in Capture. His early works include his cyber attacks against NATO and reporting on its military operations since 2001.