Aksioma - Zavod za sodobne umetnosti, Ljubljana presents:

Paolo Cirio REALITYFLOWHACKED Solo Exhibition   Aksioma Project Space Komenskega 18, Ljubljana April 26 - May 20, 2011 Opening: April 26 at 7 pm Artist talk: April 26 at 6 pm FREE ENTRANCE!

PRESS RELEASE

Photo: Janez Janša

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Stories, interventions, tactics and concepts of social realities designed and perpetrated by the new media artist Paolo Cirio will be displayed together for the first time in a solo exhibition at the new Aksioma | Project space.

The core of this exhibition will be the opus of new media projects realized by the artist in the last years, including Face-to-Facebook (2010), P2P Credit Cards – Gift Finance (2010) and Open Society Structures (2009).
All these art pieces are conceived and performed in our advanced Information Era, in which media are hybridized, scattered, and blurred with the real, they are networked though, and they work through participation of the users.
Cirio's works spot this media context, revealing information as ontological basis: specific devices, languages or techniques of media do not really count anymore, it is the art of orchestrate and structure information by networked media that emerges as major matter.
Consequentially, these art works question how specific arrangements and processes of information can vary the construction and perception of cultural, political and economic realities. They investigate on information as rough material and how to structures it to depict and confront the power of media. In Cirio's works the layers of the media complexity are organically composed, displaying his sophisticated structures able to destabilize powerful firms or design worthy realities.
Every work exhibited in the show is installed as offline mixed media installations. These art installations render sophisticated media hacks, fabrication of narratives and insightful paradigms in objects, videos, pictures and illustrations, in which the audience can enjoy concepts and actions which originated the art works.

More about the exhibited works below!

Featured works

The Face-to-Facebook is the media hack of Facebook.com, where its data has been radically reprocessed to construct new controversial structures. Like in the former Cirio's projects Amazon-Noir (2006) and Google will Eart Itself (2005), realized together with Alessandro Ludovico and Ubermorgen.com, the development of smart software has given the possibility to criticize and put in crisis the monopolistic use of data of the most powerful internet companies. In the show these projects will be depicted by objects that conceptually document the process of the actions and by diagrams of the algorithms of the hack. [MORE]

The P2P Credit Cards - Gift Finance project proposes an alternative beneficial economy by issuing a visionary type of credit cards. This action addresses critical issues about the recent recession and finance regulations, especially related to the virtualization of money due electronic payments and online trading. This project looks at money as informational entities, which can be manipulated to redefine economies and distribute wealth equally. The art installation of this piece is composed by the credit cards and the diagram which illustrates how the Gift Finance works. [MORE]

		The Open Society Structures piece outlines society organization like software designs. It uses the paradigm of information processing of the algorithms for social problem solving. This resulted in three Plexiglas black boards in which the audience can read sophisticated algorithms of taxonomies structured in order to have a utopian society constitution. [MORE]

PAOLO CIRIO

Paolo Cirio is a tactical media artist who actually living in London and working internationally. He hacks and orchestrates media through videos, coding, websites, social media, printed media, interventions in public spaces, characters enacted by actors, audience participation and accurate researches, in order to create edifying narratives, controversial provocations and tacking social issues. His primary inspiration is in corporate and state interventionism through the use of information power, which is depicted and interpreted in his radical and controversial art works.

Paolo was part of [epidemiC] net-art collective (design of the virus Biennale.py, 49th Venice Biennale, Slovene Pavilion) and has collaborated with many other pivotal figures of net-art and street-art scene, like Bruce Sterling, Ubermorgen.com, RTMark, Alessandro Ludovico, among others.

He has been awarded with the Transmediale award (2008), the Stuttgarter Filmwinter award (2007) the Media Award St. Gilgen school (2006); Comission Rhizome (2005) and received the honorary mentions at Ars Electronica (2005).

[MORE]

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Credits:

Paolo Cirio
Realityhackflow

Author: Paolo Cirio

Production and organization: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2011
Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Executive Producer: Marcela Okretič
Public relations: Mojca Zupanič
Technical support: Valter Udovičić

Supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana - Department of Culture
Sponsor: Datacenter d.o.o.

Special thanks: Alessandro Ludovico, Geoff Cox, MGLC Ljubljana

Contacts:
Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana