In the solo show
AI Attacks by Paolo Cirio, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the Internet are subverted and used tactically within information-warfare on privacy, bias, and disinformation.
Cirio's decades-long commitment in using the Internet for art and activism is presented at Foam, the photography museum in Amsterdam. Paolo Cirio intervenes in information wars related to police, military, and corporate power. The exhibition features the projects
Capture,
Obscurity,
Street Ghosts, and the new commissioned work
Resurrect. Installations with prints, videos, and artifacts throughout the rooms of Foam showcase his online artistic interventions and activist campaigns.
Cirio’s attacks, as hacker practice, make use of coding, data-mining, artificial intelligence, and social media, not only to reveal the dangers of such technologies, but also exploiting them tactically. He explores their potential as tools for counter-narratives, counter-surveillance, and counter-discrimination.
While attacking institutions as a means of provocation, Cirio proposes new regulations, investigates and exposes evidence, discusses the ethics of this practice, and explores the aesthetics of this material. Aside from artistic actions, Cirio has written theoretical essays, promoted policy campaigns, and engaged with lawyers, journalists, and activists to make his art an active social agent.
Cirios’ attacks often generate personal and legal threats from his targets. At the same time, he engages online audiences and the mass media with wide coverage of his actions. His attacks are performances that unfold in a few weeks or months on the Internet, in the media, and also in public space.
Cirio addresses Artificial Intelligence as automated violence in the form of surveillance, discrimination, and disinformation. He exposes such violence through the police’s use of facial recognition, the criminal data industry, and military propaganda. AI as a violent unregulated weapon amplifies cultural conflicts expressed in information wars that power structures want to dominate and activists need to dispute. With his projects, Cirio challenges these powers, exploring AI for his counter attacks.
Descriptions of the artworks shown at Paolo Cirio’s exhibition AI Attacks at Foam:
Resurrect
2024, Videos, 3D prints, and military uniforms and insignia.
This work deals with the use of AI for cloning individuals and spreading disinformation. Cirio attacked military culture by resurrecting four historical mercenaries using deep-fake technology to address identity theft and disinformation with AI. Cirio resurrected four dead mercenaries from the neo-colonial wars in Africa in the 1960s, and had them voice their regrets in online communities of military enthusiasts. The mercenaries resurrected are a French fascist, a German nazi, a Belgian colonizer, and a Brit working for South Africa’s Apartheid, respectively Bob Denard, Siegfried Müller, Jean Schramme, and Mike Hoare. Cirio used AI to reanimate faces and voices using archive material and by training AI on his historical research to make them tell the truth about their complicity in war crimes. Their new anti-militarist propaganda and crime probes were then spread in social media channels where these mercenaries are still considered war heroes. In particular they seek to reveal the truth regarding the assassination of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, in which they were linked, with the UK and US still withholding evidence in a recent investigation. The art installation physically reassembles the resurrected mercenaries by featuring their skulls, military insignia, and uniforms from the epoch. Four monitors mounted on poles act as talking heads for each mercenary. In this project, AI also refers to autonomous soldiers, weapons, and cyber warfare tactics for spreading sensitive information and propaganda.
Capture
2020, C-Prints.
This work deals with AI for facial recognition to identify suspects. Cirio attacked the French police by using facial recognition to identify thousands of officers and address their mass surveillance. Cirio collected hundreds of public photos of police officers in France, then extracted over four thousand faces with facial recognition, and published them on his website Capture-Police.com to crowdsource their identification by name. Cirio also highlighted police officers shooting at protesters with rubber bullets to seek accountability for police brutality. The project generated strong reactions from police unions in France, and police supporters sent personal threats to Cirio. Shortly after, the Interior Minister of France, Darmanin, made a public statement against Cirio and his action, threatening him with legal persecution. In addition, the minister censored the work by requesting the removal of Cirio’s art installation from a museum in France. At the time France was using facial recognition for mass surveillance and was about to pass a security law forbidding the publication of photos of police officers in the media. In tandem with the attack, Cirio created a campaign to ban facial recognition in Europe, which collected over fifty thousands signatures and ultimately was officially acknowledged by the European Commission. Facial recognition with AI and the use of other biometrics technology and data have come under stricter regulations in Europe as of 2023, however elsewhere in the world its use is on the rise.
Obscurity
2016, Archival inkjet prints.
This work deals with AI for analyzing criminal data and predictive policing. Cirio attacked six mugshot websites by stealing their identity and corrupting their data to address bias, inaccuracy, and violation of privacy and dignity. Cirio collected over ten millions mugshots and criminal records from the main U.S. mugshot websites and republished them online blurred and with the data shuffled. In response he received legal threats from the owners of the mugshot websites. Many individuals affected by these websites contacted Cirio to ask for help and explain their situation and stories of abuse by the police and Internet platforms. In parallel to the attack, Cirio created a campaign to bring the European privacy policy Right to Be Forgotten in the United States, advocating for it for years around the time content moderation was highly debated and was still considered censorship. To this day, the United States still has an unregulated data brokerage market, which is now used to train AI models. Mugshots and criminal data have been used to train AI for predicting policing and background checks that incorporate the biases and disinformation embedded in the data source.
Street Ghosts
2012-ongoing, Vinyl prints.
This work deals with AI for pattern recognition and privacy invasion. Cirio attacked the service Google Street View by posting printed photos of individuals at the exact location where Google took them to address the invasion of privacy in their personal lives. Cirio pasted hundreds of these photos of individuals in cities around the world. In the prints the watermark and the year of copyright of Google remain visible, pointing at the contested ownership over the image and data collected and exposed. In the exhibition, Cirio showcases his action in Amsterdam conducted in 2013. Through this work Cirio foresaw the present moment in which AI can stalk individuals in their public and private lives by recognizing the details of their clothes, behaviors, objects, and environments. The potential of pattern recognition by AI makes biometrics outdated in profiling and identifying individuals, something that relies on mass data collection and mining. Google aggregates several data points on individuals, often without consent or with weak privacy protection, and then trains AI to potentially identify specific details in the data. Some individuals become casualties of the AI and data dragnet, and their ghostly human figures symbolize casualties of the information war in the city, a consequence of the battle over public and private data among companies, governments, citizens, and algorithms.
