LUDIC TEA: Hacking for Interactive Art Activism

Artist and activist Paolo Cirio orchestrates actions on the internet by hacking power structures and engaging online audiences in playful interactions with the data he exposes. His interventions and social experiments engage crowds of participants to play, react, and interact with his websites, which make sensitive information an agent of knowledge and change. His work employs a variety of strategies, including transmedia, documentary, street art, and internet art.

Paolo Cirio is an artist, activist, and media theorist. He investigates and subverts systems of power; the evidence he exposes forms the basis of his creative advocacy campaigns. He has received numerous legal threats for his art interventions, which involved hacking, data leaks, and identity theft – his cyberattacks have unsettled Facebook, Amazon, Google, VISA, the Cayman Islands, and NATO, among others. He is known, for instance, for exposing over 200,000 Cayman Islands offshore firms, publishing one million Facebook users on a dating website, and obfuscating 15 million U.S. criminal records. As an activist, he mobilizes around internet privacy and artificial intelligence, high finance and intellectual property, climate change, and militarism. His artworks are presented as installations, artifacts, photos, videos, and public art, both offline and online; his theoretical essays examine the aesthetics and ethics of his practice.


Cirio has had solo shows at Foam Museum, Amsterdam (2024), Sale Docks, Venice (2023), Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2021), and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2019), among others. His works have also been presented at the Whitney Museum, New York, Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondazione Prada, Venice, Kunsthalle Wien, and the Warsaw, Göteborg, Gwangju, and Strasbourg biennials. His awards include the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica (2014), second prize at Transmediale (2006), an Eyebeam Fellowship (2012), and an NEA grant at ISCP, New York (2017). paolocirio.net