Paolo Cirio's Modena Exhibition Challenges Digital Surveillance
A solo exhibition of Paolo Cirio at a venue in Modena, curated by Marco Scotini, presents a decade of works that critique digital surveillance and corporate data exploitation. The show includes Iris, a panoptic tower of modified iris prints that subvert ocular recognition; Street Ghosts, life-sized posters of passersby taken from Google Street View; Overexposed, HD stencil images of US intelligence officials; Face to Facebook, documenting Cirio's creation of Lovely-Faces.com using one million Facebook profiles; Obscurity, which blurs 10 million arrest mugshots to assert the right to be forgotten; and Capture, a facial-recognition awareness campaign that gathered over 50,000 signatures and a response from the European Commission. The exhibition's title, Monitoring Control, suggests both the power of big data holders and the need for resistance.
Key facts
- Paolo Cirio (born 1979 in Turin) focuses on controversial aspects of the information society and corporate big-data use.
- The exhibition covers works from the last ten years, curated by Marco Scotini, known for the Disobedience Archive.
- Iris is a panoptic tower of eight modified iris prints that subvert ocular recognition.
- Street Ghosts are life-sized posters of passersby extracted from Google Street View.
- Overexposed features HD stencil images of high-ranking US intelligence officials sourced from public internet platforms.
- Face to Facebook documents Cirio's Lovely-Faces.com dating site created with one million Facebook profiles using algorithms.
- Obscurity blurs 10 million arrest mugshots and shuffles names to prevent identification, addressing the right to be forgotten in the US.
- Capture is a campaign against facial recognition that gathered over 50,000 signatures and received a response from the European Commission.
Entities
Artists
- Paolo Cirio
- Marco Scotini
Institutions
- European Commission
Locations
- Modena
- Turin
- United States