Capture, 2019-02-02, Paris

2020 - Photography (Photography)

100 x 100 cm

Paolo Cirio

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Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris. Capture demonstrates how the unregulated nature of facial recognition software can easily be wielded against the very authorities that are enthusiastic about implementing its use against the public. As such, the work belies the potential pitfalls of the technology by making visible the asymmetrical power relations bound up in its usage. In collaboration with privacy rights organizations, Cirio has organized a campaign and petition advocating for the ban of facial recognition technology in Europe. In the context of the 2020 protests in France against the Global Security Bill project, Capture became quite polemical. The bill proposes to criminalize the publication of images of on-duty police officers. While at the time, Cirio’s work was intended to be included in an exhibition at Le Fresnoy-Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, the work was pulled from the exhibition after criticism on Twitter by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who threaten legal action if the work was not removed and the online database deactivated.

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Artist Paolo Cirio engages with legal, economic, and cultural systems of information. His work considers how various modes of information control affect society by examining topics that have been transformed in the Internet era. His research- and intervention-based practice is communicated through interdisciplinary projects that include video, installation, print, and public art. Focusing on subjects such as privacy, copyright, democracy, and finance, Cirio’s practice exposes the ethical complexities bound up in social, technological, and cognitive systems. Through recontextualization and appropriation, Cirio’s work brings to the fore the conflicts and contradictions inherent in institutionalized information control. His use of social interventions, irony, popular culture, and provocative visuals makes his work accessible to a broad audience.

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Colors:

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• technology.n.01
• artificial_intelligence.n.01
• power.n.01
• inequality.n.01
• activism.n.01
• surveillance.n.01