Foundations reflects on the aesthetics and history of conceptual art concerning social complexity. Jack Burnham's seminal defining of "systems aesthetics" in 1968, followed by the exhibitions Software at the Jewish Museum and Information at MoMA in New York in 1970, mark a turn in art addressing social and technological systems. Foundations focuses on the ontologies of conceptual art examining social fields, rather than solely the making of images, forms, or gestures driven by ideas. Informed by systems, cybernetics, and communication theories, this project reckons with today's complexity in the age of algorithms, big data, and the Internet. This study and timelines by Paolo Cirio research on the genesis of the growing intersections among the domains of art, economics, politics, law, sociology, media, and technology.

Paolo Cirio presents the three series of works Attention, Property, and Derivatives in his solo show Images Rights at NOME Gallery in Berlin. The exhibition Images Rights expands upon Cirio's concept of Internet Photography, with a particular focus on the economic, legal, and semantic values of photos circulating online. These Cirio's works explore modes of appropriation art to address the political economy of images. Rather than authorship, these artworks problematize the ownership, liability, and social responsibility of the production and distribution of photos on the Internet. The series Attention, Property, and Derivatives each examine, respectively: images as currency of the attention economy, images as capital, and images as finance.

THIS MONOGRAPH FEATURES PAOLO CIRIO'S CONCEPTS, MODELS, AND INTERVENTIONS UTILIZING THE FLOWCHART AS ARTISTIC MEDIUM. CIRIO'S WORK CHALLENGES AND INVESTIGATES THE ECONOMICS, POLITICS, TECHNOLOGY, AND SEMIOTICS OF THE GLOBAL INFORMATION ORDER. THIS SURVEY FEATURES THE ARTIST'S USE OF FLOWCHARTS AS A VISUAL STRATEGY FOR SOPHISTICATED APPARATUSES, IDEAS, AND ACTIONS. CIRIO'S RESEARCH, INTERVENTIONISM, ACTIVISM, AND INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT ARE PRESENTED IN INSTALLATIONS AND ARTIFACTS BOTH IN DIALOGUE WITH THE LEGACY OF CONCEPTUAL ART AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF CONTEMPORARY ART. ARTWORKS: Foundations; Meaning; Sociality; Daily Paywall; Global Direct; Art Commodities; World Currency; Loophole for All; Gift Finance - P2P Gift Credit Cards; Hacking Monopolism Trilogy; Face to Facebook; Amazon Noir; Google Will Eat Itself; Open Society Structures; and early sketches.

Today, human sociality is affected by devices subtly designed to program behaviors and profile citizens. This book contains over 250 selected patents that the artist Paolo Cirio found by sifting through over 20,000 inventions he published on the website https://sociality.today. The artist organized the patents into chapters such as Discrimination, Polarization, Addiction, Deception, Targeting, Control, and Surveillance. With this artwork, Cirio exposes inventions that employ devious psychological and profiling tactics through artificial intelligence, algorithms, data mining, and user interfaces. As artistic provocation, the Coloring Book of Technology for Social Manipulation proposes the cathartic, childlike exercise of coloring to both educate and inform through the visually rendered compositions of outlined flowcharts and patent titles.

OVEREXPOSED is composed of a series of nine unauthorized photos of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials of the NSA, CIA, NI, and FBI who were related to Edward Snowden's revelations. The appropriated material was found by monitoring photos and selfies published on Internet public platforms without the control of the officials. The images were reproduced with the street art HD Stencils technique, and they were disseminated onto public walls throughout major cities. The artwork satirizes the era of ubiquitous surveillance and overly-mediated political personas by exposing the officials accountable for secretive mass surveillance and over-classified intelligence programs. New modes of circulation, appropriation, contextualization, and technical reproduction of images are integrated into this artwork.