Monitoring Control

A collection of ten texts by the artist and hacktivist Paolo Cirio on surveillance, social media and algorithmic control, published for his 2021 solo exhibition in Modena.

The book adds a text by Bruce Sterling and a conversation between Christian Marazzi, Marco Scotini and Cirio. A gallery of images drawn from the thousands of algorithm patents Cirio has collected online shows the tools used for surveillance and social manipulation. Its subjects include Instagram, Facebook, mugshot websites and Google Street View, and the ways these tools shape daily life. It accompanied the exhibition Monitoring Control at the Palazzina dei Giardini of Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curated by Marco Scotini and on view from November 2021 to January 2022.

Cirio has spent about twenty years examining the relation between the information society and global capitalism, an approach he calls Evidentiary Realism. The exhibition gathered ten years of his work, among it Street Ghosts, Face to Facebook, Overexposed and Obscurity, and opened with a large new installation, Iris.