Daily Paywall
2014 - Newsprints and plastic newsrack, dimensions variable.

This artwork appropriated over sixty-thousand news items from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Economist. In Daily Paywall, Cirio redistributed thousands of pay-per-view articles for free by hacking the paywall systems of the three major financial newspapers and proposed a new economic model for circulating news articles. Readers could earn one dollar for responding correctly to quizzes about the featured articles, journalists were invited to claim compensation for their writing, while donors could offer any amount to crowdfund the model. DailyPaywall.com has over 60,000 articles in total; Cirio selected fifteen topics, each featuring eight articles published in 1,000 print copies which were distributed as a free paper available in custom newsracks and bookshops throughout New York City. Eventually, the site was shut down when the publisher Pearson PLC made claims on its own copyrighted material. A year after the legal threat, Pearson sold both The Financial Times and The Economist. As a result, Cirio republished DailyPaywall.com in its entirety. In Daily Paywall, Cirio’s radical action and participatory model elicited reflection on access to knowledge and the contemporary information economy. The work was staged by utilizing the distribution of information as a material to make works of art and to interrogate legal, linguistic, and socioeconomic structures. In the installation, elements of the performance are assembled to document and recall its propositions. Printed copies of the Daily Paywall newspaper are available to the audience, while the flowchart print of the economic model stands as the core concept of the artist’s intervention.

Video playlist


Selected shows and presentations history
Not Fake News, exhibition at Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa - Israel
As If, exhibition at Framer Framed, 2017, Amsterdam - Netherland
How much of this is fiction, exhibition at HeK, 2017, Basel - Switzerland
How much of this is fiction, exhibition at Fact, 2017, Liverpool - UK
Mozfest, exhibition at Ravensbourne College, 2016, London - UK
SIGHT & SOUND, exhibition at Eastern Bloc, 2016, Montreal - Canada
FutureEverything, lecture at Town Hall, 2015, Manchester - UK

Selected bibliography
L'Arte di Paolo Cirio nella Società dell'Informazione, Catalog, Lulu, U.S., 2020, ISBN 9781716839214
Daily Paywall, YET, Magazine, Switzerland, 2020, Issue #12
FLOWCHARTS, Systems of Systems, Artist Monograph, Lulu, U.S., 2019, ISBN 9780359616718
Art in the Age of Financial Crisis, Visual Resources, Journal, Interview, Taylor & Francis, UK, 2018, Vol. 34
The Art of Paolo Cirio, Theory Culture & Society, Journal, Review, Sage, UK, 2017, ISSN: 0263-2764
Social Algorithm Art, Catalog, Peter Niemann, Text to the World, Germany, 2016, Issue N.16
MoneyLab: Failing Better, Catalog, Institute of Network Cultures, Netherlands, 2016, #3
Franchir le mur del l’info, Métro Montréal, Newspaper, Interview, Canada, Oct. 1st 2016
Hack attacker in Manchester, The Big Issue, Magazine, Interview, UK, 2015, 16-22 February 2015
Take Down Notice, AfterImage, Magazine, Interview, U.S., 2015, Vol.4 No.5

Pictures of the installations for Daily Paywall


Pictures of Daily Paywall newspaper and newsrack in NYC










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