Leonardo Selvaggio

In 2015, I was highlighted as a featured artist in Chicago Artist Month for my work in The People's Pamphlets, a curatorial project by Jessica Cochran exhibited at Spudnik Press. The People’s Pamphlets is a risograph edition of 25 tri-fold pamphlets by contemporary artists. Brochures are not thematically oriented, rather they animate the interests of each individual artist in a wildly disparate, fantastically in-cohesive manner. My contribution was the URME Hack Me Kit, a continuation of my research in how to translate my identity into a malleable material for others to use in the face of overwhelming technological power, such as surveillance. The brochure consists of four main sections: an Identity Script, DNA samples, information about my URME Surveillance Project, and lastly logins to my social media accounts. My interest in the URME Hack Me Kit, was to use the brochure as a way  to disseminate myself as material to the public, while critiquing some of our cultural practices seated around surveillance.

For the exhibition, I created over 60 DNA samples from both my hair and blood specimens.  

As a featured artist, I was invited to do an additional installation. I chose a minimal approach to keep the emphasis on the pamphlets. I introduced a convex mirror that doubles as a surveillance element. Cameras could be seen in the mirror's reflection.