Tittytainment Age - Exploring the flipside of Collective technology

Written by Maria Serena Padricelli, Chris Dugrenier and Maria Radu, MA Culture, Criticism and Curation, Central Saint Martins

Tittytainment Age is a virtual exhibition in response to the 2020 Logan Symposium held by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and its theme ‘Collective Intelligence'. The team, made of students from Central Saint Martins MA Culture, Criticism and Curation and MA Fine Arts, conducted research on the power of communication and currency tools which manipulate our sense and perception of the world in subtle ways.

The project brief challenged the team to experiment with research-led curating, artistic practice and investigative journalism, to work with technology to enhance storytelling and promote journalistic investigations. The digital nature of the project gave us the chance to take our first steps in the digital world by approaching technology and its tools. The idea was to take advantage of the available resources from the university and plan a complex technological project. As students, you probably know that an educational environment provides an opportunity to experiment and make mistakes. This encourages teams to be more creative in their practice and to ‘dream big’, as they are offered technical support to achieve the desired result in their projects. Unfortunately, reality often differs from initial plans, and the support a project gets is usually not enough.

Here is a video walkthrough of the virtual exhibition:

Firstly, we, as a team, would like to offer you some advice. Technology wise, we share here some Dos and Don'ts for future references:

Things to consider: compatibility within applications and browsers, knowledge of coding language and programs, where to get that knowledge from, do not expect to gain this knowledge in less than 4 months.

• Do - Bring in an expert in the programme you intend to use at the beginning stage - Use Linkedin Learning video courses to understand the basics and to have a little knowledge on softwares and coding languages, that helps the communication with experts - Use updated computer softwares/hardwares - Balance your expectations with your expertise - Give more time to your expert;
• Don't - Technology does things fast for you but you cannot do fast things with it: to make a 17 seconds video on Blender took one of us 6 hours, but our expert took just 5 min - Don’t panic!

Secondly, regarding the collaborations, the partnership with the CIJ has had its beneficial aspects, such as the Symposium’s theme framed our research fields and our participation at the Symposium attracted artists to participate. It also gave us a clear idea of the target audience and a real life purpose of the project: being part of a live event, it has not been just an exercise.

The cross-courses collaboration enables better preparation to enter the art field. The rationale behind the mixed team has served MA Culture, Criticism and Curation, students as an experience to engage with artists by offering them a space to create artworks, alongside with the selection of existing works. From this approach, we have learned as curators, it is our duty to respect artists’ voices and let the artworks breathe. Meanwhile, for the MA Fine Art students, it has been an experimental journey in which they learned how to engage and work with curators in creating an artwork based on a selected concept for an exhibition. The introduction of a MA Arts & Science student gave another twist to the project, by creating a good balance between curators, artists and technology. This has been an occasion to step into someone else’s shoes, an interesting exchange of perspective between artists and curators.

Overall, Tittytainment Age has been a great experience, the first one in our lives that creates the ground for future projects.www.onswitchedoff.com is the platform where this ground has been located and where future exhibitions will be held.

On that note, we are delighted to invite you to participate to the second online event of Tittytainment Age. The topic of the talk will be Art & Technology, we will discuss the relationship between art and technological devices and its influence on creative practice.  Feel free to join the conversation!

Book your place on Eventbrite

Lastly, if you are developing a  project that you believe could fit in our Art and Technology theme, please keep in touch as we are developing researches for a new exhibition. We can be contacted on onswitchedoff@gmail.com, and on Switched off Instagram.

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