Paolo Cirio is a renowned digital artist and activist running several campaigns for digital rights and showing in international museums.

Kilton Hopkins is a mathematician focused on cybersecurity and former director of the Level IoT Program at Northeastern University.

Milanthi Sarukkali holds a PhD in Mathematics and is a consulting actuary focused on climate change.

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In Dialogue with Paolo Cirio
Interview by Mita Medri

Over the past two decades, Paolo Cirio has built a distinctive practice that blurs the boundaries between art, technology and activism. Combining artistic intervention with investigative methods, Cirio’s practice challenges dominant technological and political structures while inviting public debate about transparency and democratic agency. Through insights from his current IMPAKT residency, including early reflections on post-quantum cryptography and the future of digital security, his upcoming talk Art & Activism On Tech-Authoritarianism on June 27th at IMPAKT will explore urgent questions shaping our networked society.

In this interview, he reflects on technological opacity, the rise of techno-fascism, and the evolving possibilities and limitations of hacktivist practice. He also offers a brief insight into the research he is developing during his residency at IMPAKT, including early reflections on post-quantum cryptography and the future of digital security.

From facial recognition databases or offshore finance networks, your work often exposes systems that are technically “public” but socially invisible. What shifts in how we understand or relate to these systems once they are brought into the space of art?

I think it’s about seeing the forms that shape our reality. Aesthetically, quite literally, showing the systems, processes, and images that constitute our society, and so, the era we live in. In the exhibitions, I condense such socially invisible complexity in artworks that aim to provide an immediate feeling of such systems. By showing the scale, the extent, and some actual evidence in these artworks, I aim to trigger an emotional response in the public, even just from seeing the anatomies of these realities.

However, besides representing such systems, my projects involve a lot of conceptualism and performance to make them active. We could say it’s art at the intersection of journalism and activism, but I think it’s actually a way to make art that has layered practices. My work lives in different environments, the exhibitions are not the end point. I make art primarily as a form of knowledge and agency in several social contexts.

For one of our recent exhibitions, Ambient Propaganda, you exhibited a work titled Sociality (2018). In it, you reveal over twenty thousand patents for socially manipulative technologies by hacking the Google Patents search engine and reframing them as posters, a website, and a coloring book. I’m quite interested in the coloring book, what drew you to presenting this material in such a playful format?

There is a paradox with the coloring book where these technologies that seem so complex and powerful become the object of the simplest game. Hand coloring makes these technical apparatuses more approachable and personal through comprehension, appropriation, and eventually erasure. Of course, the coloring book refers also to the need for educational efforts that schools should undertake in order to teach the effects that these technologies can have on people and society. After all, the coloring book, as much as the other parts of the project, serves to inform people aboutdevices that enable discrimination, polarization, addiction, deception, and surveillance.

Aesthetically, the book was also the appropriate medium, the original patents are actually legal documents in A4-format, black and white. It’s a more authentic experience to unfold these documents within the original form. Additionally, it works to satirize the particular aesthetic of patents with clip art, handwriting and drawing, technical symbols, or just boring diagrams. The engineers who made these patents would not have expected their patents to become artworks displayed in this way, quite the opposite of the original purpose.

What guides you in determining which areas of technological and social systems to focus on for a new project?

First intuition, then a comparison of urgency, especially what people need to know first or if something has been overlooked and needs to be exposed. On the other hand, things change fast these days with unstable developments, so I tend to wait to make any decision. The other problem is the hype, which most people fall into and tends to be a waste of attention and work for years. Hype unfortunately produces a lot of cultural damage and a monopoly of misunderstanding that doesn’t allow free expression. Just think about crypto in art. Unfortunately, certain cultural environments don’t actually allow some projects to thrive, even if in theory they should.

Then, please also consider my situation. I do everything by myself, I don’t have a team, a lab, or a salary. Because of the scale of operations and risks involved in my work, I maintain a high-level of stress and self-discipline for a very long time. So, I need to be careful about what I take on and make sure it is worthwhile.

Today, technology is considered ever more opaque and illusive, with algorithms and large language models often operating in ways that are unknowable to even the humans that design them. This is often called the “black box” problem. How do you navigate working within this murky environment? What role does this technological opacity play in your practice?

I believe these black boxes are a real problem, and indeed, with AI, have become an even greater problem since some malicious intentions can be concealed deeply inside opaque models. However, even if we don’t know how they work, and the complexity of finding out where bad worms hide, it’s still easy to evaluate the results in the outputs. Therefore, the flaw is immediately evident. These kinds of investigations inside and around these black box systems already exist. The works by organizations like “AI Forensics” and “AlgorithmWatch” are good examples.

Already in 2018, in my essay Evidentiary Realism, I foresaw this approach,“Even the most complex black boxes are interrogated by counter black boxes programmed to illuminate the obscure artificial intelligence, high-frequency algorithms, and big data of our computational society. The asymmetry of the power of vision and knowledge is bound to be a pursuit of the technological field that will keep leveling itself.” It’s also good to remember that there are many black boxes, not only in technology. After all, the underlying concept of an opaque realism was that,“The real is present and concrete, yet complexity, scale, speed, and opacity hide it from sight. The contemporary features of the social landscape are unintelligible at first glance. Although we see the shocking results of our social reality, we are nonetheless often unable to see the systems and processes that generate such conditions.”

You’ve described your work as often placing you at the forefront of technological development, with the aim of addressing policy questions before they arise. What are some urgent policy questions you think are emerging today but are not yet being properly addressed?

Well, maybe beyond just policy and regulations in technology, today we should also pay more attention to its hard politics. I think people are underestimating the rise of Techno-fascism.

The question of policy can work only if we have a democratic system in place, if human rights are protected, and if our values point to improving ethics. But, if those are replaced by repressive laws and cultural decline is celebrated, then, for sure, priorities are different. At this point, I think more so than thinking about policy, we should oppose fascism and promoters of ignorance and disinformation. Techno-fascism is serious and it is just a handful of individuals leading it with specific tactics. I think it’s bad to be addressing technology only generally, mentioning the danger of it, but without making cases and naming individuals behind those.

These days, the policy space is pretty full, and yet, there are plenty of empty words. People fear to mention the elephants in the room. An example is X (Twitter) governed by Elon Musk, and still used by most public institutions, politicians, universities, etc. These institutions might hold important events on regulating AI, the danger of social media, etc, and then they keep engaging on Musk’s platform, not investing in any alternative. It’s really a shame, because they could be the ones making a difference and allowing such a needed change. For the campaign I run to Ban X in Europe and to rein in the influence of Musk on our democracies, I still didn’t get any support or invitation by any institution, which proves how the matter is still overlooked today, while everyone is falling into traps and being brainwashed in various forms of new-fascism.

You are currently working with post-quantum cryptography, which is a field concerned with securing information in a future where current encryption systems may no longer be safe. What interests you about this field? And how does it connect to your broader interest in exposing information systems?

I don’t think people are aware of how many things are relying on cryptography and how it is actually vulnerable. It’s as if everything stands on one brick. Remove it and all our digital infrastructures will collapse at once. There is so much potential for disruption and a power grab, which really distresses me. It might sound like a technical issue, but it’s actually very simple. Yet, it’s not told due to negligence and lack of literacy.

Something you can also note is the hype around quantum, including in the arts, which hyperbolically represent its potentials, but without addressing the social implications. People might not know that all the developments in quantum computers are aimed at breaking encryption, and that they even started from that challenge. There are some measures to mitigate this danger through new cryptographic schemes, but they are not properly tested and not largely implemented.

I believe this situation is one that deserves more attention. My background in cyber-security and digital-rights can allow me to take it on. I was also drawn to the scientific challenge, the field of physics and its world of discoveries and breakthroughs in science. I am so grateful to have met the mathematicians Kilton Hopkins and Milanthi Sarukkali, who led me into this fascinating world and made this project possible.

You have been working with hacktivist tactics for over twenty years. How has your practice evolved since you first started?

Well, it has been a long trajectory. At the beginning, most of the technologies of the Internet were made by activists, and made specifically for themselves. Think of the network of IndyMedia, one of the first social media and self-pushing platforms. Even cryptography was actually a tool for activists who were making it open and secure. Also in art, with Tactical Media, the aim was still firstly activism, rather than filling up galleries or museums. Today, things are very different. For instance, if I mention crypto, it now means something completely different.

However, since the beginning, I have been more interested in the mechanics and history of contemporary times. Technology might have been the driving force of this history, but I have always been more interested in the social implications, the transformation in politics and economics, which at the end of the day form our society. My approach to technology is broad, and so I research other domains such as finance, law, science, etc. After all, for me hacktivism was only ever a methodology of research and intervention.

Concerning my own practice, well I not sure if I can be positive, I feel now there is an end to it due to the cultural decline, repression, and those who protect only their personal interests. In the future, “Slop Art” might be the only survivor. It is the art of the new regime of Techno-fascism, where, for sure, activists can no longer work.