Collaborations

Tittytainment Age: Exploring the flipside of collective intelligence.

This year this CIJ has collaborated with students from MA Culture, Criticism and Curation and MA Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. The students were given access to the CIJ's archives and information about the 2020 CIJ Logan Symposium. The result is a brand new virtual exhibition that responds to this year's theme, "Collective Intelligence".

The term “tittytainment” was coined by political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1995 to describe the way in which entertaining and intellectually undemanding content, pacifies the public, and inhibits independent thinking. We view this phenomenon as an opposing perspective to collective intelligence. The works in this project critique the state of contemporary media and how audiences navigate hyperactive streams of content and information. The project as a whole looks to energise a collective agency and ’switch people on’.

In this exhibition, a virtual lift leads the audience through a selection of digital artworks, that explore how the power of media, artificial intelligence, big data and political and financial instruments, manipulate our sense of the world and in subtle ways. The works have been created by the artists Chris Dugrenier, Talia Golchin, Tobias Gumbrill, Zahraa Karim, Barbara Kapusta and Min Yu. They foreground the role communication tools play in constructing individual subjectivity and agency. Both subjectivity and agency are sociological concepts; the former refers to consciousness and cognition from one’s own perspective, the latter is associated with the capacity of acting independently based on free-will, as if the feeling of being in the driving seat.

You can visit the exhibition here.