Sociality, a new project by Paolo Cirio.
PRESS RELEASE, October 12th 2018, NYC.
Human sociality is being engineered and patented.
https://SOCIALITY.today
The artist Paolo Cirio investigated public repositories of patents to reveal
thousands of technologies that conceal the social control, manipulation, and
surveillance at play on the Internet.
Sociality aims to exploit intellectual property laws for monitoring and
regulating information technology. As an artistic provocation, it proposes the
oversight, flagging, and banning of socially harmful inventions that employ
devious psychological and profiling tactics through artificial intelligence,
algorithms, data mining, social media, user interfaces, and tracking, in favor
of a more ethical use of technology.
Today, human sociality and psychology are affected by devices subtly designed
to program social behaviors. Sociality seeks to inspire regulations,
accountability, and public awareness regarding these apparatuses. Beyond
addressing the technology itself, the artwork looks at intellectual property as
a political and economic field that has become applied to the sociality of
humans. Our sociality is now being owned and traded by private companies
without public scrutiny. This artwork documents the history of the unscrupulous
business of engineering human sociality with the introduction of technology for
social networks, Internet advertising, and even mind-reading.
On Sociality’s website everyone is able to browse, search, submit, and rate
patents by their titles, images of flowcharts, and the companies that created
them. Both the artist and the online participants perform oversight of invasive
inventions designed to target demographics, push content, coerce interactions,
and monitor citizens. In the exhibition, the public confronts large-scale
compositions with images of flowcharts that abstractly invoke the complexity
and magnitude of uncanny plans to program people. Images of flowcharts of
patents are composed with short descriptions and patent numbers to be shared
online or through printouts distributed at art shows and in the public space.
The documentary form of this artwork aims to shed light on contemporary
mechanisms of social control by showing evidence of complex technological
systems and their roles in enabling addiction, opinion formation, deceptions,
discrimination, and profiling. Sociality examines the concepts of social
bubbles, algorithmic bias, amplification of misinformation, behavior
modification, tech addiction, and corporate surveillance. Expanding from
privacy and bias, this project focuses on technology for the manipulation of
human behaviors and psyche. Attention economy, steered social validation, and
habit forming products can be psychologically damaging and impact social
relationships to the point of harming the fabric of society and endangering
democracy.
We regulate the financial sector, we have check and balance in the government,
we ban the sale of guns, and toxic chemicals. As information technology impacts
society perilously, we must also regulate both centralized and decentralized
platforms, infrastructures, and interfaces with inventive, restrictive, and
reflexive policies.
The first presentations and interventions with Sociality will be on October
13th at MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Berkman Klein
Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University on October 12th.
Read more about the Sociality project here:
https://SOCIALITY.today/about/
Regulatory Art
The cultural celebration of technology concerns the ethics of representation.
Critical art should account for the intentional and unintentional social
consequences caused by technolibertarianism. In a time when institutions
struggle to regulate technology, artists can creatively engage with regulations
and governance as a form of Regulatory Art. Technology is now a cultural field
in which belief systems, politics, and ethics are central in determining the
acceptance of any technological system. Data, code, crypto, and platforms are
not the law, nor above it, and they should never be. Technology has become a
political agent and its governance needs creative, critical, and dynamic
propositions from artists. Regulatory Art is the practice of addressing,
engaging, and inquiring about regulations in the technocratic society we live
in.
Paolo Cirio also addresses the politics of Internet regulations in his ongoing
projects https://Obscurity.online and https://Right2Remove.us
The project Obscurity connected individuals affected by the mugshot publishing
industry and provided a point of departure for the project Right2Remove to
regulate the exposure of stigmatizing and abusive content on Internet search
engines.
After two years of activism and organizing, Right2Remove grew into a community
of activists, lawyers, and journalists spread across the United States and
internationally. Right2Remove is now forming as an organization and partnering
with the Association for Accountability and Internet Democracy. In order to
create Internet regulations Paolo Cirio’s campaign is successfully shifting the
cultural understanding and knowledge about the Right to Be Forgotten and
privacy inequality in United States.
The data collected for the Obscurity project, over 10 millions images of
mugshots and 15 millions criminal records, has all been deleted without
archived copies as a final part of the Internet art performance. In addition,
the obfuscated websites will be delisted since they served their function and
mugshot websites have been changing and multiplying.
Paolo Cirio discussed the mugshot websites and the Right2Remove in this article
on The Guardian US in June:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/12/mugshot-exploitation-websites-arrests-shame
The artwork Obscurity is currently in display as an art installation at the
12th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea:
https://paolocirio.net/work/obscurity/inst-gwangju.php
Moreover, the Right to Remove and content moderation on Internet platforms will
be discussed with experts in a panel organized by Paolo Cirio and the Center
for Technology, Society & Policy at The School of Information, University of
California Berkeley on November 15:
https://ctsp.berkeley.edu
Finally to conclude the projects, Paolo Cirio addresses abuses and freedom of
speech on the Internet with the theoretical text “Perceptions on Systems of
Justice over the Internet”:
https://paolocirio.net/press/texts/text_obscurity-right2remove.php
Thank you for your support.
Paolo Cirio Press.
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