Daily Paywall, repurposing information

Daily-Paywall

Daily Paywall, Paolo Cirio’s latest work, is based on thousands of articles literally stolen from economic online newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and The Economist. The (political) script developed by the artist is capable of scraping texts from the articles and freeing them from their paywall jail, bypassing the system that makes the contents accessible exclusively through a paid subscription. The articles were then republished online on a website, which is now offline due to copyright infringement. They were also printed and distributed on paper in the streets of New York and stored in (traditional) newspaper dispensers. In order to improve the reading of the articles, the readers received a symbolic fee ($1) in exchange for filling out a survey on the quality of the articles. A crowdfunding system was also available to let the reader reward her favorite author directly. Daily Paywall suggests a new, extreme model of information distribution, where the value of knowledge is no longer in the access to information but in its widespread diffusion. This idea is transposed into a true economic model where the value chain is totally reversed by recombining the relationships between the actors involved. Here, the value of news is in the chance to (literally) understand it. At any cost. Chiara Ciociola

 

Daily Paywall by Paolo Cirio