In the broad field of media art Paolo Cirio’s work (for all its variety) performs one important overarching task. It consistently challenges a status quo in which ubiquitous digital surveillance has combined with algorithmic decision making and machine learning to create opaque and unregulated forms of power and control.

Although research and knowledge has long been a core value in contemporary art, Cirio’s work addresses more specific questions through reviving an emphasis on realism and evidence. Belief in the potency of evidence as a means of speaking truth to power has long fallen out of favour in the post-modern age. To this end he introduced the term “Evidential Realism”. In an interview for a BBC radio documentary (2019) Cirio argued that a new category of “truth-seeking artworks […] explore the notion of evidence and its modes of representation”.

It should be noted that Cirio was early in championing what could be seen as the first fully-fledged research led contemporary art movement whose methodologies are explicitly empirical.

Any serious survey of Cirio’s decades of practice will show that his work encompasses but goes beyond the current AI hype machine. His oeuvre occupies a relatively new context that surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has called the “post-panopticon era”. Unlike Bentham’s panopticon in which we may be being watched, in the “post-panopticon era” we can be certain of only one thing, we definitely are being watched.

But alongside his willingness to analyse and observe, Cirio’s practice is characterised by his rejection of the role of ‘artist as impartial observer’. Like the first wave of 19th century realists such as the author Émile Zola and painter Gustave Courbet, his work is proudly partizan, it takes sides. It intervenes, frequently confronting powerful state and corporate actors.

There is a number of exemplary works in his solo show in Foam that demonstrate his effectiveness within the Post Panopticon. But I will focus simply on one of the most powerful and complete examples; Capture (2020).

In this project Cirio begins with an extensive trawl for publicly available images of police photos taken during street protests in France. He then processed this harvest with Facial Recognition software, posting the results on an online platform accumulating a database of 4000 faces of police officers in order to crowdsource their identification by name. Importantly Cirio took this project beyond the screen by printing posters of the officers’ headshots and posting them throughout Paris to expose them also in the public space.

In different ways the Capture project invokes the classic ‘tactical media’ trope in which the weak turn the tables on the strong. And in this case had the effect of spotlighting the unregulated use of mass surveillance and facial recognition by law enforcement to identify suspects. 

The fact that this project was effective in touching a raw nerve can be gauged by the fact that it generated outrage from police unions and their supporters resulting in a number of personal threats to the artist. Shortly afterwards the Interior Minister of France, Gérald Darmanin, presented a public statement against Cirio and his actions, threatening him with legal prosecution. In addition, the minister sought to suppress the project by requesting the removal of the installation from a museum in France.

In a contemporary art world long dominated by post-modern suspicion of truth claims based on empirical evidence, Paolo Cirio’s provocative journalistic approach to art and data offers a refreshing 21st century re-specification of the enlightenment principle of speaking truth to power.