During his residency, artist and activist Paolo Cirio is researching the risks that quantum computing poses to current cryptographic systems. Cryptography is one of the hidden infrastructures of digital society. It protects communication, financial transactions, data storage, public services, and many of the many systems on which privacy and digital rights depend on. Cirio’s research asks what happens when this invisible infrastructure of trust becomes unstable, and what political, social, and cultural consequences may follow. The project explores what is sometimes referred to as the “Quantum Threat Timeline,” “Q-Day,” or the “Cryptography Apocalypse:” a possible future moment when quantum computing could undermine the mathematical foundations of today’s encryption systems.
As part of his residency, Cirio is collaborating with mathematicians Kilton Hopkins and Milanthi Sarukkali who are based in Berkeley, California. Hopkins is a creative mathematician focused on cybersecurity and former director of the Level IoT Program at Northeastern University. Sarukkali holds a PhD in Mathematics and is a consulting actuary focused on climate change.
The group operates as citizen scientists, policy advocates, and creative mathematicians. In an artistic form, with little use of numbers, the project explores a new form of “Quantized Math Art”. This series of artworks, tilted “Quanta Forms”, comprises drawings and animations representing prime‑number probability distributions, quantum‑feedback waves, periodic entanglement patterns, superposition of dimensions, and other principles of quantum mechanics and computation. The final artworks, “Quanta Forms”, are visually striking compositions of geometric shapes with intersecting circles, waves, and cubes that through minimal and complex diagrams reveal the interdependence of quantum elements and the mathematics behind cryptography.
Cirio works at the intersection of art, technology, activism, and policy. His projects address systems shaped by surveillance, artificial intelligence, finance, intellectual property, militarism, and digital rights. Using journalistic, scientific, and artistic methods, he translates complex systems and hidden forms of power into works that invite public debate and collective agency.
The residency examines how emerging forms of computation may reshape the infrastructures that underpin contemporary digital life, opening questions about security, sovereignty, and collective responsibility.