Paolo Cirio is a media artist active in various fields including Internet-based art, street art, video art and software art. Alessandro Ludovico is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine. In 2011, they presented their collaborative work, Face to Facebook as a media hacking performance targeting Facebook.
In this work, the artists store 1 million profile pictures from Facebook, categorize them into six stereotypes, and post them on a custom-made dating website. By creating a virtual public space, lovely-faces.com, Cirio and Ludovico mean to violate social rules determined by privacy issues. Simultaneously, the two reveal how the public’s favorite social network site is essentially structured to expose individual privacy.
Cirio and Ludovico focus on the ‘face’ of Facebook users which they consider to be quintessential data, as exposing one’s most attractive ‘face’ is the fundamental socialn system behind Facebook. The more that people expose themselves, the more their online networks expand in the world of Facebook.
Why is Facebook so similar to dating sites even though it has evolved more sophisticatedly in many aspects? It is because Facebook users, whether intentionally or not, allow their faces to be explored sexually by making them public. Thus this project, in a way, re-contextualizes the trust among the hundreds of millions Facebook users.
Skepticism against online privacy is an important element in understanding this project. However, it should be noted that the artists are not trying to establish a critical protest against the online giant. Instead, Cirio and Ludovico attempt to point out how everyone can become a potential hacker by displaying the faces captured in a ‘net’ of Facebook. In short, beyond those smiling faces, we are supposed to face the inherent vulnerabilities of this online environment.
