Works Paolo Cirio - Tactical Media Artist

Selected Works :

The Big Plot - Recombinant Fiction
This is a spy-story played on the Infosphere, rendered into a new form of fiction.
Four characters told a story using dialogues shown on YouTube videos, blog posts, via entries on their Facebook, Flickr and Twitter profiles. Actions in public environments completed the set of stages where the story was acted. Audiences had an active role in the story, they unfolded and created other pieces of fiction. The cloned identity of a real spy was used to portray a story about political and sentimental weakness of our era characterised by dysfunctional sociality which is being created by social media communications. The drama deconstructed language and symbolism of ideologies by remixing characters' lifes and identities with real-world patterns.

- PDF Press Release, 15.Jan.09
- Critical text .Move Festival Catalogue (en) (de)
- Final Interview, Web Literature book (en) (it)
- Interview for Springerin Magazine (en) (de)
- Interview for Velvet Magazine
- Recombinant Fiction Theory

- Selected exhibition installation pictures:
.Move Festival Halle, Cairo Prize Milan,
TinaB. Prague, Da Festival Sofia, Viareggio Art Project

- website: www.thebigplot.net

mixed media
variable dimensions

Open Society Structures - Algorithms Triptych
This is a study that explores the notion of direct, participative and processual democracy. It includes a basic taxonomy of cultural, economic and political concepts relevant to the creation of a ideal society, showing the direction of dependencies, feedback interactions, and the relative significance of qualities and activities.
The research presents a series of abstract structures, providing a framework for bringing together egalitarian values, collaborative perspectives and edifying voices in an equal and open decision-making process.

- PDF Press Release, 15.July.09
- Interview for Neural magazine

- Download pdf files of the diagrams

- Selected installation pictures:
Turin Share Festival, Cairo Prize Milan

digital print on plexiglass
39x54cm each

Time and Truth Don’t Unveil the Reason
This work is created from a digital copy of the painting "The Truth Unveiled by Time" by Baroque master Giambattista Tiepolo. It has been partly covered by stickers which alter the interpretation of its iconographic symbolism.
The painting has been used as the backdrop for press conferences given by Silvio Berlusconi’s Italian government. The Prime Minister altered the painting, hiding the nipple of the woman (allegorically the truth). "Time and Truth Don't Unveil the Reason" concerns censorship and political consent. It suggests that time and truth alone are not sufficient for finding illumination by the light of reason – a position ever obfuscated by control over people’s perception of reality.

- PDF Press Release, 08.July.09

- Selected prototype installation pictures

digital print PVC and vinyl stickers
prototype. 250x170cm

Check-Check Reality
This project focused on airport security regulations, seeing them as a worst case scenario of playing on peoples fears.
It looked at how security is installed as a focal point in our daily lives. The online platform was set up in order to deprogram people from the PsyOps of the Security Theatre, and to solve ambivalent attitudes towards reality through providing an opportunity for self psycho-analyzation in the airport scenario.
Coauthor: nina roth.

- PDF Press Release, 11.Sept.07, 20.June.08
- All chapters of Check-Check Essay
- Interview for VORL Magazine

- Selected installation pictures

- website: www.check-check.org

mixed media, plexiglass box,
35x35x40cm

People Quote People - The Death of the Author 2.0
This is a radical approach to the concept of the author as social degeneracy.
The quotes no longer refer to the correct authors. In the mock website quotes are continually reordered randomly with different authors, spreading online misquotation mistakes as a form of liberation from the authorship fixation.
This is a research into authorship issues in the era of the creative economy, with its attendant profusion of prosumers.

- PDF Press Release, 10.Oct.07
- Interview for Neural magazine
- Selected installation pictures

- website: www.peoplequotepeople.com

engravings on white marble
30x19x4cm each

Amazon Noir
This digital action (media hack and hack activism) was carried out in the global massmedia, within the art world and on a highly sophisticated technical level. Amazon e-commerce websites were vulnerable targets. We eluded the copyright protection with software robots that used the front door of “Search Inside” service. We stole digital complete volumes of books, reassembled them into pdf format and redistributed them for free. The action is documented by various types of offline conceptual installations.
Coauthors: alessandro ludovico and ubermorgen.com

- PDF. Press Release, 15.Nov.06
- Interview for CONT3XT/furtherfield magazine
- Amazon Noir my personal factual diary

- Selected Art Stolen Books, pdf version
- Diagram mechanism, gif version
- Code of the hacking, zip pack

- Selected exhibitions installation pictures:
MOCA Tapei, DEAF Rotterdam, Laboral Gjion, Share Turin, Transmediale Berlin
CinemaCity Novi Sad, HMKV Dortmund, PlugIn Basel, Edith-Ruß-Haus Oldenburg

- website: www.amazon-noir.com

mixed media, overhead projectors
variable dimensions

Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI)
This is a digital action (media hack and hack activism). We generated money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden websites. With this money we automatically bought Google shares. We wanted to buy Google via their own advertisments. After this process we handed over the common ownership of "our" Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. which distributed them back to the public. By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstructed the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model. Furthermore, it was to show-case and unveil a total monopoly of information and a weakness of the new global advertisment system.
Coauthors: alessandro ludovico and ubermorgen.com

- PDF Press Release, 20.Dic.05
- Interview for Digicult magazine
- Interview for AdBuster magazine

- Diagram mechanism, gif version
- Code of the hacking, zip pack

- Selected exhibition installation pictures:
PAN Naples, MOCA Tapei, Premises Johannesburg,
CinemaCity Novi Sad, Art Center Nabi Seul

- website: www.gwei.org

mixed media, overhead projectors
variable dimensions

Post Brands Era
This is a trilogy of three street-art pieces which played the role of protagonist for a poster campaign, which took place over two years around seven European cities, in several different formats and dimensions. Here their tribute, formally displayed, focuses the idea of the "Post Brand Era" in which logos seem to be a dictatorial sign of industries that dominate contemporary society.

- Selected installation pictures
- Selected Post Brands Era public installations pictures
- Archive various street-art and jamming culture pieces

digital prints
21x19cm each