Abstract

Keywords: Face to facebook, Amazon Noir, Google will eat itself, hacking, revelatory diagrams, big online corporations.

The three artworks of the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy are “Face to Facebook”, “Amazon Noir” and “GWEI-Google Will Eat Itself”. These works have much in common in terms of both methodologies and strategies. They all use custom programmed software to exploit three of the biggest online corporations, deploying conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in their well-oiled marketing and economic system. All three projects were ‘Media Hack Performances’ that exploited security vulnerabilities of the internet giants’ platforms to raise media attention about their abuse of power. These performances were staged through the global mass media for millions of spectators worldwide. The processes of the projects are always illustrated diagrams that show the main directions and processes under which the software has been developed to execute the performances. Finally, all the installations we exhibited did not use computers or networks, focusing more on the display of the processes than on the technologies.

ISEA2013, in collaboration with Vivid Ideas, presents a keynote address from Italian media critics and hacktivists Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, whose infamous online project Face to Facebook involved stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software, and then posting them on a custom-made dating website. Conceptually hacking big online corporations has proven to be a symbolic, dangerous and revealing artistic process, challenging funding principles of the digital economy and of digital communication at large. Face to Facebook work is the third part in the Hacking Monopolism Trilogy which also includes hactivist projects centred around Google (Google will Eat Itself) and Amazon (Amazon Noir).

• Paolo Cirio (Brooklyn, US) is a media artist who hacks and orchestrates media through videos, coding, social media, digital prints, public interventions and audience participation, in order to create controversial provocations and to tackle social issues. Exploring information as a magmatic material that can be shaped, he sculpts it by fabricating stories, processing data and contextualising contents, creating sculptural structures of information in which layers of media are composed in order to reveal unexpected forms. His projects have been sustained by awards, residencies and commissions and featured worldwide.
• Alessandro Ludovico (Bari, Italy) is an artist, media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine since 1993. He has published and edited several books, and has lectured worldwide. He is one of the founders of Mag.Net (Electronic Cultural Publishers organisation), and has also served as an advisor for Documenta 12‘s Magazine Project. He has been guest researcher at the Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara.

Full text (PDF) p. 316-318