Tittytainment Age. Exploring the flipside of collective intelligence.

Tittytainment Age

Exploring the flipside of Collective Intelligence

Curatorial team Na An Isa Bascuñana Chris. Dugrenier Talia Golchin Maria Serena Padricelli Maria Radu Clara Wicaksono

Technical team and digital collaborations Sion Fletcher Yuriy Polotnyanko Jake Charles Rees Savi Shetty Ziqin Yan (Castan)

In collaboration with the Centre for Investigative Journalism and their 2020 Logan Symposium on ‘Collective Intelligence’.

Introduction Tittytainment Age is a digital exhibition built around a virtual lift. As the viewer moves up and down between the floors, each artwork explores the power dynamics within a social exchange system; from social media, through different artificial intelligence technologies, all the way to financial and political instruments. As the viewer travels up in the elevator, the works present an increasing hierarchy of complexity in the way these tools are adapted. From the simplest and most visible forms of manipulation, towards the most sophisticated and arguably invisible forms of control.

The exhibition interrogates the power of communication and currency tools that manipulate our sensation and perception of the world in subtle ways. These external forces play prominent roles in constructing an individual’s subjectivity and agency. French philosopher, Michel Foucault, considers subjectivity as the precondition of agency, an individual’s capacity to act is determined by his capacity to think and decide.

Tittytainment, a term coined by political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1995, describes the way in which entertaining and intellectually undemanding content pacifies the public and inhibits people from independent thinking. We view this phenomenon as the opposing perspective of collective intelligence.

The works in this project critique both sides, power and lack of power. The project as a whole looks to energise a collective agency and ‘switch people on’.

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FIFTH FLOOR Chris. Dugrenier No one can touch a could until it rains… 2020 Virtual 360 artwork Courtesy of the artist

FOURTH FLOOR Barbara Kapusta Dangerous Bodies 2019 HD video with sound. 07:00 min.

Courtesy of the artist

THIRD FLOOR Min Yu Island of Angels 2020 HD video with sound. 04:33 min.

Courtesy of the artist

SECOND FLOOR Zahraa Karim Iron sky & Selfies for inclusions 2018 HD video with sound. 02:31 min.

Courtesy of the artist

FIRST FLOOR Talia Golchin All eyes on me 2020 Interactive 360 virtual space Courtesy of the artist

GROUND FLOOR and LIFT ENTRANCE Tobias Gumbrill Silicon Mind 2018 HD video with sound. 02:16 min.

Courtesy of the artist

About the works Silicon Mind (2018), Tobias Gumbrill “The once glorious isle of humanism is melting into a silicon sea.” (Erik Davis, 2015). Silicon Mind is a circuit operating in an everlasting loop; its appearance is familiar, but translucent. It rests upon a wave that, like the mind itself is constantly moving and transforming. The two are joined in a never-ending flux that governs the four corners of the screen.

All eyes on me (2020), Talia Golchin This work is an observation of our current online human experience, where our desire for watching others, as well as being watched through the filters, has blurred the line between reality and fiction. It seems our lives have become an online and virtual theatre stage with performers and an audience. I was particularly interested in the surveillance aspect of our collective digital experience. From my observations of online human interaction it seems that the original idea around the panopticon has evolved from a concept coined by English Philosopher Jeremy Bentham, where individuals are continuously under surveillance from a central viewer. By contrast, the online panopticon involves surveillance between individuals as well as the central viewer (e.g corporations, state, AI and organisations). I decided to explore how this fits with the new digital world and came up with the idea to create an interactive encounter, where the viewer enters a virtual elevator through which they access the second floor of a building into a holding cell (a ‘virtual prison’).

Displayed all around the room are iconic theatre masks that watch and follow the viewers movement as they explore the space. The floor of the room is depicted as a digital display which is the centre stage that displays entertaining videos of ‘ordinary’ lives online. All of the faces in the videos have been produced with AI (artificial intelligence) and are therefore not from a real person. The viewer can participate directly in the artwork through the live camera button which will enable their image to be placed on the stage amongst all the other images and videos. We behave differently when we are being watched...

My questions are, how does constant surveillance of our current online existence manipulate our thoughts and actions over time? How does our online life effect us when we are offline? What does the future hold, are they eventually merging into one entity?

Iron sky & Selfies for inclusions (2018), Zahraa Karim It explores themes of computational reliance, privacy and identity. Using Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Great Dictator’ speech in a Siri voiceover over songs attained by the disruption of an individuals personal space via the app Shazam, Karim hones in on the constant reminder throughout her work: visibility is nothing but a trap. Using the machinic gaze, she asks you to consolidate with the eye in the sky and join the revolution embedded in our human spirit.

Taking action, Karim has been working towards a fully functioning website that proposes an ethical AI training data set. Initially taking inspiration from her own experience as a multiracial, Muslim female, she engages with open source facial recognition software to look at how she is seen digitally. Disappointed the machines could not see her, she began a mass participation project asking for ethical selfies, and offered agency to each participant regarding the processes that govern our lives. Ensuring visibility and agency to participants, her practice begins the conversation by posing a question, rather than an answer, and takes a step towards equity and justice in the use of AI.

Island of Angels (2020), Min Yu Min Yu’s work dances with the viewer’s patience by inviting us to converse with the narrator. The latter starts asking questions in a medium that reminds us to some sort of escape room. The narrator is very insistent and persuasive as the viewer is not able to respond. This work challenges the concept of agency, underscoring it by not giving the viewer the chance to take the decisions and answer based on his free will. It manipulates the spectator by tricking him into thinking there is a choice to be made, while the choice has already been taken for us.

Dangerous Bodies (2019), Barbara Kapusta Barbara Kapusta’s work perfectly represents the marriage between artificial intelligence and human sensitivity and how it affects the way we live. This implication of biological and non-biological intelligence, with a distorted voice as if it is speaking from a futuristic machine, reveals that we live in a “trembling reality” in which a rich model of diverse technological processes are exponentially growing. This scenario is a pure revolution targeting human bodies, making their “eyes blind” and their “hear deaf”.

Ray Kurzweil in the Law of Accelerating Returns forethought that Machine Intelligence will surpass human Intelligence. Indeed, computers are exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain. Following this route, our way of creating relationships changes by communicating with automated personalities (Alexa or Siri, et al), who will be our teachers, companions and lovers; while the same personalities feed information straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Those automated personalities are “Dangerous Bodies” that examine our data and guide our way of living.

No one can touch a could until it rains… (2020), Chris. Dugrenier We were invited to take part with the MA CCC in the Centre of Investigative Journalism’s Open Lab project ; a curated exhibition presented during the Logan Symposium where artists explore ways to work with archives, data sets and other investigations’ source materials in a way to support/enhance the communication of a journalistic narrative.

The theme of the Logan Symposium made us question the term ‘Hegemony’, as a contradiction to the ideals of ‘Collective Intelligence’. An Na and myself paired to focus on the Dollar Hegemony story, wanting to show how power when concentrated in one area of influence grants influence onto others. My particular interest was more with the wider notion of money and the agency it provides. Indeed, as the singing goes ‘Money makes the world go around’.

When researching about the Dollar Hegemony, diving into monetary treaties, economic theories, financial data, it was noticeable how the language used to describe an economic state borrowed that of describing the weather and water.

There is a lot of ‘liquidity’, ‘floating’, ‘Blue skies’, flows, volatility, storms ahead.

And indeed, conditions in one region will affect another region thousands kilometres away. This became a direction and I arrived at a ‘monetary system’ visualised as an abstract formation of shapeshifting forms, interconnected in perpetual motion; subtle changes that come from real data -in this case, the IMF World Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves and when in close proximity to key historical political events. Searching for those ‘key’ found footages that could tell a history of the 20th century in a 3 min. ‘gif’ length was challenging. The wealth of source material can be overwhelming and the process of simplification never satisfying. This is not the history of the 20th century, but a highly edited slanted ‘best of’.

The work is presented inside the virtual space, a limitless place that is ideal to shape and model concepts, complex ideas and abstract worlds. In this space, there is no physical boundaries, space is disorientating and our mind can fly.

There is also a parallel between the gaming use of such space with that of the ‘gaming’ of the monetary system that is not lost on me.

www.onswitchedoff.com