Workshop: “inVeritas, The Secret Workshop: Preparation and creation of an Italian Media Hack Performance” – Paolo Cirio

October 30, 2011 12:20 pm

4th november –  2.30 PM – Laboratorio Quazza – via Sant’Ottavio 20, Torino

inVeritas is a project to democratize the power of the Italian media.

Everyone should have the right to inform, thus breaking up the monopoly held by the mainstream media in Italy, renowned for their factiousness and systematic servility, and the censorship and manipulation of information.

inVeritas gives everyone the chance to speak and disseminate news directly through news-stands across Italy.  The inVeritas.net platform enables screamers to be generated for all the major Italian newspapers.

The workshop is free and does not require any special technical skill. It is designed to be broadly accessible, and open to people of all ages and artistic backgrounds.

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In brief:

Every citizen is invited to freely create the news story he or she wants to communicate. With inVeritas.net, newspaper headlines can be generated for twenty-one Italian papers in A3 format, ready to print-off in seconds. Citizens, either individually or in groups, can then disseminate the news story by posting the headlines near their local news-stands. Make Headlines! Create your own news story and announce it through Italian news-stands.

What & Why

inVeritas is a project to democratize the power of the Italian media. Everyone should have access to the right to inform, thus breaking up the monopoly held by the Italian media, renowned for their characteristic factiousness and systematic servility, and the censorship and manipulation of information. inVeritas gives everyone the chance to speak and disseminate news directly through news-stands across Italy.

The inVeritas.net platform enables headlines to be generated for all the major Italian newspapers, with a view to intelligently and effectively shocking, irritating, provoking indignation or just humorously informing the incredulous readers of the headlines created with inVeritas.

Every citizen can freely create the news story he or she wants to communicate. Via inVeritas, newspaper headlines can be generated in A3 format, ready to print-off in seconds. Citizens, either individually or in groups, can then disseminate the news story by posting the headlines near their local news-stands.

Where & How

Through inVeritas.net, everyone is invited to create and print-off news headlines carrying the logos of major Italian newspapers, and then post them up around news-stands.

How to use inVeritas:

1) Think of the news story you want to communicate and the newspaper that expresses it best. You have eight lines and one hundred and eighteen keystrokes at your disposal, and twenty-one Italian newspapers to choose from. Let your imagination run wild, with a view to intelligently and effectively shocking, irritating, provoking indignation or just humorously informing the incredulous readers of the headlines created with inVeritas.

2) With your headline fully inserted in the template, click on the bottom button to create an A3 format PDF file automatically, with your headline formatted just like the true, classic screamer. Download the PDF onto your computer and copy it onto your USB stick.

3) Go to a copy shop, print-off your headline in black & white, A3 format, and then at night or over the weekend, when access is easiest, post up the sheets in the vicinity of news-stands, using adhesive tape or pegs.

4) When you have posted up your headline, take a photo of it and upload it onto inVeritas.net, to share your contribution to reclaiming the power to inform with other users.

Upload your photos of the news-stand by clicking on the “News-stand Photos” link for the relative headline posted.

Where to post headlines:

Simply in the vicinity of news-stands, on nearby walls, over the previous day’s headlines or directly on shutters. All you need is some transparent adhesive tape or pegs—take your cue from those already there, to make your inVeritas headline as easy to read as possible.

In order to ensure the greatest reach possible, we recommend posting your headlines up near churches, stadiums, parks, cemeteries and other areas popularly visited on a “typical Italian Sunday”, and taking advantage of the closing hours of news-stands so as to have greater access for replacing headlines.

N.B.: Most Italian copy shops are closed on Saturdays.

We recommend printing-off your headlines and making copies discreetly during the week.

6th November 2011:

6th November – National Action Day to “Reclaim the Power to Inform”.

– This is a subversive initiative. Please act in secret, whilst spreading the word to encourage widespread participation across all of national territory – Tired of Italian newspapers? Print your own truth! Take part in reclaiming the power to inform!

To launch the inVeritas project, the 5th–6th November will be dedicated to a nationwide initiative to reclaim the power to inform from the media.

Through inVeritas, everyone is invited to create and print-off tampered headlines for all the major Italian papers, and post them up near news-stands on Saturday night, 5th November, and on Sunday afternoon, 6th November.

A day dedicated to freedom of information, in a country blacked out by the overwhelming power of the media.

In order to ensure the greatest reach possible, we recommend posting your headlines up near churches, stadiums, parks, cemeteries and other areas popularly visited on a “typical Italian Sunday”, and taking advantage of the closing hours of news-stands so as to have greater access for replacing headlines.

N.B.: Most Italian copy shops are closed on Saturdays.

We recommend printing-off your headlines and making copies discreetly during the week.

The workshop:

The Secret Workshop: Preparation and creation of an Italian Media Hack Performance.

The workshop will be held during the Share Festival in Turin on 4th November 2011.

What will Paolo Cirio do?

Paolo Cirio has prepared a special project for an Italian Media Hacking Performance. The workshop will introduce the “inVeritas” platform for creating newspaper headlines for all of Italy’s major dailies. Together, participants will create the perfect news stories, intelligently and effectively designed to shock, irritate, provoke indignation or simply inform people with humour. Then a strategic plan will be developed collectively to distribute the headlines to news-stands across Turin, so as to identify and strike the chosen target in the most effective way possible.

The workshop will also be an opportunity to identify certain weak points in the promotion of artistic projects at the national and international levels, by capturing the attention of the media, and at the same time encourage community participation.

Additionally, the workshop will also discuss some of the communication and specifically linguistic techniques used by contemporary media. The strategies and tactics used for cultural communication, for marketing and by politics will be analysed and subverted, so as to take back the power of mass social influence, hijacked by contemporary media.

Paolo will provide an introduction to a number of communication theories, developed by radical media theorists. The theories and analyses briefly presented will help to understand and resist media manipulation in the information age.

Introducing Paolo Cirio 

Paolo Cirio has been producing media hacking performances for over a decade. His first international success came in 2002, when the US Department of Defense and the Canadian Department of National Defence investigated the pacifist strikes he organised against NATO servers.

Since then, he has received prestigious awards from media art festivals for having stolen and artistically subverted key data from Amazon.com and Google AdSense, which he used to create performances and installations shown at international exhibitions.

His latest work, in which the profiles of a million Facebook users were stolen to create an online dating website, won an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica, and in a single week captured the attention of over a thousand international media outfits, including newspapers, blogs and TV broadcasters.

In the meantime, Paolo has been organising illegal Street-Art happenings to decorate city blocks, with the participation of dozens of artists.

Since 2008 he has been researching a new genre of fiction, in which the cinema, literature and theatre converge through social media, involving urban intervention and the participation of the public. Two “alternative reality” works, produced with professional actors and scriptwriters, involved the participation of hundreds of participating spectators.

Recently, Paolo has been involved in disseminating revolutionary fake new Visa credit cards, designed to promote an alternative economic model to underpin democratically distributed minimum incomes.

Paolo carves information flows through the re-contextualisation, manipulation and dissemination of information via various media. His artistic work explores the social, political and economic influence of information, through the media and techniques necessary for disseminating it. By analysing communication, sociological and technological methods, Paolo creates works that structure information, in which data take on forms that are able to influence a mass audience actively, while embodying innovative aesthetic qualities.