Epis.#246: Paolo Cirio, New York-based political artist, activist and hacker, - a podcast by Michael Shaw

New York (and sometimes Europe)-based artist, internet activist and hacker Paolo Cirio talks about:

How he makes a living as an artist, mainly through commissions, workshops and guest appearances (and the occasional sale), and spread through several European cities as well as New York, and also how he keeps his expenses (including his rent in NY) low; his near future as an artist, as far as how sustainable his career is financially, should he choose to start a family; his activist roots growing up in Turin, Italy, which he describes as very working class and a lot of consciousness around politics, as well as early interest in computers and eventually the internet; his epic artwork, Loophole for All, in which he hacked into the General Registry of the Cayman Islands and published over 200,000 entities (many of them anonymous shell companies), then offered a certificate of ownership of those companies for $.99, and subsequently what it was like for him dealing with the fallout from that grand action, and how the piece tapped into complex logistics around how legislations are exploited by big global companies; why he chose the Cayman Islands for his project, as opposed to Delaware, which has a similar culture of offshore money laundering, according to Cirio; his contention that the art market is highly censored due to conflicts of interest on museum boards, including board members from tech giants like Google, in addition to his work not being ‘financially exploitable,’ thereby making it very difficult if not impossible for Cirio to exhibit his work in the U.S.; and why he isn’t going to be making an artwork that takes on Trump in conjunction wtih the upcoming election.

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