This artwork documented over twenty-thousand patents of socially manipulative information technology. In Sociality, Cirio collected and rated Internet inventions submitted to the U.S. patent office. Subsequently, he invited the public to share, flag, and ban the technologies designed to monitor and manipulate social behaviors.
Sociality
The patent images and data were obtained by Cirio through hacking the Google Patents search engine. Then he rated the patents and created thousands of compositions with images of flowcharts and titles of inventions, which were published on the project’s website. The visual compositions on the website were printed in form of posters and a coloring book for informing on devices that enable discrimination, polarization, addiction, deception, and surveillance.
The concept of turning patents into vehicles for regulation aims to exploit intellectual property law as a tool for democratic oversight. This work integrates both the dystopia surrounding technology and the utopia of its participatory governance with flowcharts of patents taking the form of documentary and protest art. With this problematizing piece, Cirio exposed evidence of social manipulation and questioned the ethical, legal, and economic structures of such technological apparatuses. In the exhibition, the public confronts large-scale compositions with hundreds of images of flowcharts that abstractly invoke the complexity and magnitude of such uncanny plans to program people.
Biography
Paolo Cirio (IT) has exhibited in museums and art institutions worldwide. He shows his research and intervention-based works through prints, installations, videos, and public art. Paolo Cirio works with legal, economic, and cultural systems of the information society. He investigates social fields impacted by the Internet, such as privacy, democracy, finance, and intellectual property. He shows his research and intervention-based works through artifacts, photos, installations, videos, and public art. Cirio’s art considers how society is affected by the control over information. It embodies the contradictions, ethics, conflicts, and potentials inherent to the social complexity of information society through a critical and proactive approach. For his art and activism, Cirio has often been subject to investigations, legal and personal threats. His artworks have unsettled institutions such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, VISA, Pearson, Cayman Islands, and NATO, among others.
