Paolo Cirio is an Artist, Researcher, Activist, and Lecturer.

Cirio engages with the social, economic, and cultural issues of contemporary society. His work intervenes in the social fields impacted by technology, media, politics, and economics in order to address human rights, economic inequality, social justice, and democracy. His interventions and research-based artworks are presented as installations, lectures, artifacts, photos, videos, and public art, both offline and online.

Cirio has exhibited in international museums and has won prestigious awards. His artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets and he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading art festivals and universities worldwide.

Cirio’s work embodies hacker ethics, such as open access, privacy policies, and the critique of economic, legal, and political models. He received a number of legal threats for his Internet art performances, including practices such as hacking, piracy, leaking sensitive information, identity theft, and cyber attacks.

Cirio is known for having exposed over 200,000 Cayman Islands offshore firms with the work Loophole for All in 2013; the hacking of Facebook through publishing 1 million users on a dating website with Face to Facebook in 2011; the theft of 60,000 financial news articles with Daily Paywall in 2014 and of e-books from Amazon.com with Amazon Noir in 2006; defrauding Google with GWEI in 2005; and the obfuscation of 15 million U.S. criminal records with Obscurity in 2016; exposing over 20,000 patents of technology enabling social manipulation in 2018. Recently, in 2020, he pirated over 100,000 Sotheby’s auction records in Derivatives, and he attempted to profile 4000 French police officers with facial recognition in Capture. His early works include cyber attacks against NATO and reporting on its military operations since 2001.