Text by Nadine Isabelle Henrich on Foam Magazine #67: The Test of Time, 2025.

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- Exhibition at the Espacio Fundacion Telefonica in Madrid with Obscurity

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» Archive Events

Paolo Cirio’s work reconfigures and intervenes in the fabric of networked information societies as he zooms in, interconnects and hacks their structural conditions. Returning to and navigating the online archive on his website on this Monday, June 2, 2025, feels different. For over 25 years, his witty, conceptual and radical practice has challenged the creeping implementation of surveillance technologies, intervened in the information wars shaping life under global platform capitalism and applied his critical analyses just as rigorously to the art system and its value structures.

Beyond its conceptual gesture and tactical intervention, Cirio’s practice anticipated and helped shape the current momentum of critical art practices engaged with information technologies, ‘always-ON technocracy’ and the realities they produce. His presentations resist opaque formalism and instead frequently adopt the spaces, codes and materiality of everyday contexts: for example, low-cost life-size prints of individuals captured in Google Street View photographs collected by the artist in Street Ghosts. Keeping their source and time imprints he wheat-pasted the appearances onto walls already layered with street art, picturing routine activities like walking down a city street, carried out by individuals whose movements and actions are constantly tracked and mined.

Cirio’s work turns tools against their creators, subverting systems by applying their own logic. His aesthetic unfolds collaboratively, weaving plots across media, platforms and economies. As such, his practice has paved the way for an expanded field of mapping and cartographic art that engages with information technologies and critiques the sociopolitical worlds they generate. At the heart of Cirio’s practice are the infrastructures and agents of socio-economic information systems—their protocols of data mining and surveillance—as the foundational terrain from which the social conditions of global networked societies emerge. It is these social conditions, with their conflicts and negotiations, that his interventions seek to expose and challenge.

Functioning as an aesthetic of systemic reversal, Cirio returns the message to its sender, confronting the architects of control with the experience of their own designs. Whether through the redistribution of 200,000 corporate identities from the Cayman Islands to the public—offering anyone in need of a tax loophole a name to steal, as in Loophole for All (2013), rendering visible the increasingly selective accountability according to class. Or through the public postering of 4,000 faces of profiled French police officers questioning the rollout of AI-driven surveillance systems in Europe, as in Capture (2020).

In Capture, a mosaic of square portraits unfolds—a visual field of varying expressions framed by a thin red line. The photographed police officers are subjected to the gaze of machine vision and facial recognition ai, recorded during protests in France. By reintroducing these isolated close ups of faces into public space the project inverts the power dynamic and reveals how automated surveillance technologies collapse the boundaries between observer and observed into a panoptic regime of extracted appearances, governed by political and economic imperatives. Capture disrupts the agency over this field of photographic visibility by flipping surveillance into counter-surveillance. Through appropriation, recontextualization, and public exposure, the project highlights the contradictions inherent in institutionalized and automated regimes of information control.

Cirio’s interventions bite or displace small but strategic chunks out of the architectures of extractivism and algorithmic authority and cause real after-effects. His works propose the figure of the artist as both a rigorous investigative researcher and a chemist of reality’s aggregate states. Emerging from profound system analysis, Cirio’s practice liquefies the rigid, rendering seemingly stable infrastructures sticky, malleable and open to reimagination. While his works a decade ago could still feel in dialogue with a lurking technofascist future, straying his archive in 2025 feels like an urgent glance toward alternate trajectories – a vector divergent from this ‘moment of transition towards a brittle multipolar world order, driven by platform authoritarianism.