For my report I will be looking at the artist Paolo Cirio. Paolo is an Italian Conceptual Artist who “works with legal, economic and cultural systems of the information society”. His works are often large collections of images or diagrams that explore how society and technology interact. He often works with appropriated images to examine culture. Recent works have explored facial recognition technology and the police that use it and Instagram influencers who promote controversial products.
The piece I will be looking at is Cirio’s 2019 piece Meaning this piece is a series of three flowcharts that explores Cirio’s “theory of Internet semiotics about the formation of social meaning online.” On first examination, it can be hard to understand what this piece is really getting at. The connections it makes are not clear right away. But with the help of an accompanying essay by Cirio it becomes clear that this piece is exploring how meaning and messages are spread across the internet. In his essay Cirio describes the internet as a medium that allows for instant feedback and discourse between senders and receivers of messages, that can be viewed both privately and publicly, being seen by thousands. The three charts explore three different ideas. From left to right they are subjectivity, context and collectivity. Subjectivity here explores the idea of private versus public, and how messages are interpreted differently in the different spaces. Context explores the medium of the internet and how it impacts the sending and receiving of messages on the internet. It highlights the factors that influence information on the internet while also highlighting the unique temporal nature of information online. Collectivity here explores how meaning is created through the internet and its messages. As messages spread, they can unify groups with shared meaning or disrupt groups with misinformation and a lack of shared meaning. These charts stance on the internet can be described as both analytical and critical of the internet.
The first thing that I thought of after diving into this piece was Abe Linkolns Complex Net Art Diagram. Both pieces explore the creation of meaning and the sending of messages online. While also sharing the form of flowchart. They both show how the internet is bigger than itself and how ideas are shared across the internet. The net art diagram explores this through dissecting the internet as a complex system connecting one computer to another. The message is created between the two computers. But there is still a large amount of complexity there that is hard to fully understand, much like the internet itself. Meanwhile Cirio’s flowcharts are a more abstract look at a whole collection of systems that come together to show the nature of an even larger system.
Looking at other sources we have looked at in class it is obvious to me to draw parallels between Meaning and Limor Shifman’s Memes in a Digital World. Memes could be described as a form of message transmitted across the internet and Shifman’s idea of examining a meme’s form, content and stance relate to Cirio’s three charts in interesting ways. The clearest overlap is in stance and context both explore the factors around a message/meme that add to its meaning and look at how the creator of the meme/message feels about the idea being sent. Collectivity can be related to form as the form of a meme can be repeated with slight variations to send similar looking messages with related meanings. The reason this works is because there is a shared understanding of what that form means and what message is sent with it.
Bibliography
https://www.paolocirio.net/work/meaning/https://www.paolocirio.net/press/texts/text_meaning.php
http://www.linkoln.net/complex/
Shifman Limor, Memes in a Digital World: Reconcilingwith a Conceptual Troublemaker