Paolo Cirio enjoys exploits. In many ways he is a virtuoso player of contemporary networks, investigating and exposing their inner workings, locating their vulnerabilities and subverting their functionality. In his latest project, Loophole 4 All , Cirio focused on an obscure side of the current networked economy: offshore finance. The artist targeted the Cayman Islands, a major offshore centre that serves multinationals and banks, providing them with privacy, little or no taxation and loose legal control. Cirio conceives of offshore centres at network switches, allowing profits to be hidden and facilitating the flow of corruption through the global market. The artist hacked the Cayman Islands government server, stole a list of 200,000 registered companies and proceeded to issue counterfeit certificates of incorporation from the company registry at very low cost. Fiction or reality one might ask. As expected, the Caymans Companies Registry denied the incident, declaring that the list was not really a hack but rather a result of a search engine scam. Unfortunately for them, Cirio had already succeeded in his task. Exploiting the loopholes that companies themselves use, he took advantage of the anonymity offshore companies enjoy, appropriated the system and opened up the stolen data to the public. While a ‘democratization of offshore business’ might be fictional, raising awareness through revealing the invisible structures of networks is apparently very possible.
Daphne Dragona

Loophole 4 All, Democratizing Offshore Business

Paolo Cirio interview about Loophole for All project on GRITtv