Monitor Control crititcal text, 2021.
PAOLO CIRIO AND HIS COUNTER-CONTROL DEVICES by MARCO SCOTINI.
Original text
- Publication Monitor Control, 2021
- Full book on Nero publisher
Press material
- EN Press Release, 1st November 2021
- IT Press Release, 1st November 2021
- Press kit of the exhibition & artworks
- Press installation shots high-res
Works in the show
- Iris, 2021
- Capture, 2020
- Attention, 2019
- Sociality, 2018
- Obscurity, 2016
- Overexposed, 2015
- Street Ghosts, 2012
- Persecuting US, 2012
- Face to Facebook, 2011
Related texts
- Internet Photography
- Regulatory Art
- Evidentiary Realism
- Aesthetics of Information Ethics
- Anti-Social Sculptures
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Midway through the nineties, the U.S. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) licensed two fundamental titles, The Electronic Disturbance (1994) and Electronic Civil Disobedience (1996) for Autonomedia Publishers. Both instantly became bibles for a new coalition of hackers, avatars, and social media activists who harness digital tools as new means of struggle and pushback. After reading the two books in Italian translations that came out a few years later, I immediately contacted Steve Kurtz, who wrote back to me from the prison in which he’d been absurdly detained by the FBI under the equally absurd Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, the result of American jurisdiction post 9/11. Steve and I worked together on a number of projects later. Along parallel lines I began frequenting the editor of the two books: the great Sylvère Lotringer. What brings me back to these texts now?
At the time, I couldn’t explain well enough to myself the tactics of the so-called “gray area” that had just appeared and combined art with activism, discovering in writing a weapon to be used in artistic and interventionist strategies–in addition to performance, graphic works, videos, and a new use of digital technology. This way of writing was no subsidiary, no supplement to the work of art, but worked autonomously and went straight into circulation with the visual productions of the artists who employed it.
Writing my introduction to Paolo Cirio’s Monitoring Control, a collection of ten texts of his, the first written in 2012, I believe this attitude has consolidated over the years and engendered a new, circumstantial realism: an attitude that permeates today’s algorithm-based visual regi- me we now call “semio-capitalism.” Also in this case, writing is an integral component of Cirio’s practice.
What currently comes to mind are the textual incursions into the “dark geography” of photo- grapher Trevor Paglen, Harun Farocki’s theories on “operational images,” and the analysis Allan Sekula makes of the status of digital photography. Paolo Cirio shifts our attention to the microphysics of power, the day-by-day expropriation the new media inflicts upon us: Instagram, Facebook profiles, websites of mug shots, misappropriation of the private anonymous by Google Street View, less perceptible forms of censorship, the relationship between art and finance, and much more. In this book, he quantifies the effects of all these factors in political, economic, social, and behavioral terms.
One of the most attentive investigators in the artistic field of the effects of the information society, Paolo Cirio has been expanding his investigations of the interrelation between the infosphere and global capitalism since 2005, channeling them into what he himself has called in recent years “evidentiary realism.” While Paul Virilio decried the world’s de-realization by the new media, hasn’t Hal Foster been advocating the return on the real since the nineties?
A series of important works and texts makes it clear that Cirio wants to give visual and verbal form to all those forces that capture and control our existence (pervasively, with invisible violence) by vanishing from normal perception and then remaining carefully concealed while ostensibly operating in the daylight. In this context, realism means seeing through the modern world’s economic, social, and juridical opacity, not only by tearing the mask from appearance but also by providing a visible model of what’s really going on behind our backs and under our feet. This volume presents many of the tactics Paolo Cirio has employed as artist and hacktivist, never stopping to desecrate, and revealing that which cannot be profaned, what must be returned to community use, precisely what modern control devices have captured. The title, Monitoring Control, alludes to two types of monitoring: the control exercised by the powers in force, and the counter-control social subjectivities can exert by first becoming aware of the phenomenon, then interrogating it closely and, finally, through an antagonistic ope- ration. In this sense, Monitoring Control is both a precise analysis and a toolbox to be opened for possible sabotage of contemporary forms of security and surveillance; in short, a wide-ranging but deeply-rooted assessment of all the violations of the terms of Information Ethics.
This volume was printed on the occasion of the homonymous exhibition by Paolo Cirio, held at Palazzina dei Giardini della Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, November 20, 2021—January 31, 2022.
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