Why are people turning off their phones? Productivity movements like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and the increasingly popular Brick encourage us to silence our digital devices and “take control of time” in favor of focus and general life improvement. Young people are filling “analog bags” with junk journals and crocheting projects to stop doomscrolling. Rave organizers are enforcing phone bans for the sake of the vibe. And in New York City, the eight-day Summer of Ludd festival gathered together disconnection-curious individuals and committed Neo-Luddites to imagine life beyond the algorithm, offering free workshops on offline flirting and digital security for activists.

This summer, I’ve found myself unintentionally digital detoxing thanks to happenstance – namely, a weeklong stay near Mount Rainier with only occasional glimmers of phone service, plus a phone that leapt off my bathroom sink and shattered a corner of the screen. As a result, I committed to remembering the colors and shapes of blooming wildflowers without on-demand online plant ID and learned to put my trust in trail signage without Maps. I’m still searching Google less frequently, given my continued limited access to the letters “A”, “S,” “W” and “Z.” Disconnection, I’m learning, is a redirecting force, a detour that makes you ask yourself where you really want to go. The destination, whether it’s joy on the dancefloor or self-optimization, is determined by the one who disconnects.

In this issue, we’re thinking about disconnection. In Visions of Attention, Eleanor walks us through the Middle Way of the Dharma. In Stuff for Study, I share readings on darkness retreats, the so-called analog revival, and the Great Offline. And in IRL, we invite you to direct your attention offline, to seminars on CULTURE JAMMING and LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND.

Yours offline,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

The Middle Way

Beneath the open sky of the Sarnath deer park , Gautama Buddha sets the Wheel of Dharma into its first revolution. Before him sit five ascetics who were once his companions in extreme “self-mortification.” Siddhartha Gatuama’s path was itself carved through a landscape of extremes: first the opulence of a prince’s life, then six years of ascetic self-denial. But enlightenment did not bloom at either extreme; it was the Middle Way he discerned during this legendary sit that became the way of the Dharma: the still midpoint where liberation resides.

Strains of asceticism run through spiritual and religious traditions across time and place. The Śramaṇas, spiritual wanderers who preceded and surrounded the Buddha’s own path, practiced total renunciation, shedding household, caste, and name. For them, discipline was found in the total severing of every earthly tether. This profound disconnection was meant to reveal what remains when everything is stripped away.

This scene in the deer park shows what fruits asceticism can bear. The five bhikkhus sitting before the Buddha had once practiced asceticism at his side, until he chose the Middle Way. To the five bhikkhus, his moderation looked like giving up. Turning their backs on him, the ascetics had cast him into isolation. It was there, solitary beneath the Bodhi tree, that the Buddha arrived at the awakening that he subsequently returned to his exilers. Disconnection was not a barrier to insight; it was the very path by which insight emerged.

—

Stuff for Study: Pages Not Found

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• Gentle parenting my smartphone addiction — Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker

• In nature, life is not easily bounded — Derek J. Skillings for Aeon

• The romanticization of the Great Offline — Lauren Collee for Real Life

• Can you lose your mind on a “darkness” retreat? — Chris Colin for The New York Times Magazine

• The analog revival did not take place — for Considered Chaos on Substack

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Wed, July 15th: ATTENTION LAB: COALITION is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!

• Thu, July 16th: Join us for our IRL seminar CULTURE JAMMING, where we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers. Enroll HERE!

• Tue, July 21st: Join us for our IRL seminar LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND, where we’ll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by human fracking. Enroll HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

Clayton, Missouri, 2003: I’m in the basement of my parent’s house watching the older kids (brother, sister, cousins) play Mario Kart 64 on our staticky, five-thousand-pound television. I’ve never been a gamer, and prefer to spectate in these scenarios, but when my cousin Devon hands me her three-pronged controller, I solemnly accept. “Hold A when the light goes blue,” she advises me. “You’ll get a boost right at the start.”

I take my seat at the edge of the beanbag and fix my gaze on the upper right quadrant of the split-screen. Our racecourse is Rainbow Road. When the traffic light timer counts down, I jam “A” with all the might in my thumb and accelerate along a versicolor ribbon into the star-speckled void of space.

After the first lap, I’m in the lead and starting to feel pretty good about myself. My turns are perfectly timed; I’m skidding on the edge of a dime; my green shells fly with sniper precision. I am cruising. I am crushing these losers.

When I cross the finish line first, I can hardly contain my pride. Only once my sister Liza and cousin Patrick clock in for silver and bronze does someone point out, laughing, that Player 3 (Toad) is stalled, nose against the shimmering rainbow border wall, having travelled no more than five car lengths from the starting line. The heat blooms in my cheeks as I understand: Player 3 is me! I had been looking at my brother’s screen the whole time, thinking I was creaming everybody else while, instead, driving repeatedly over the edge of the road, only to be hoisted up by a cloud-surfing turtle and set back right where I started.

I learned a valuable lesson that day: The gap between a player’s physical inputs and the digital performance onscreen – a gap that literally defines the video game as a technology – can only be bridged by close attention. My simple mistake of looking at the wrong quadrant ruined the delicate cybernetic dance that is Mario Kart 64. This insight marked the inglorious end of my gaming career.

This week, we’re thinking about VIDEO GAMES and the special forms of attention that bridge our digital and physical worlds. In Visions of Attention, Haena looks at Lynn Leeson’s Lorna (1984) to think about different ways of “playing” characters. In Stuff for Study, Czarina shares writing on video games from Hanif Abdurraqib and Tony Tulathimutte. And in IRL, we share upcoming programs at SoRA, including our seminar on ANIMAL PHENOMENOLOGY. And if you missed our recent exhibition on gamemaking, Beyond Dark Flow, check out this write-up from Whitehot Magazine.

In splitscreen solidarity,

Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

Lorna, Our Star

Age: 40
Fears: Everything
Has not left her home in 4 ½ years

So begins Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Lorna (1979–84), an interactive video on LaserDisc played on a television set. With this prescient work, Leeson adopted a then-new commercial technology and repurposed its recording and menu functions to create a form of visual storytelling distinct from existing video games built around text commands.

There is a subtle but important difference between, say, a player playing “as” Mario or Luigi, and a player controlling our agoraphobic protagonist Lorna as she interacts with a small set of objects in her room. From the beginning, she is introduced as “our star” in the manner of a TV show. Throughout the game, the outside world threatens to breach Lorna’s private space via the television and phone. Players know the threat of invasion isn’t just a threat — it’s already happening, thanks to their own morally uncomfortable role of the silent voyeur.

Indeed, Hershman characterizes Lorna as an “artificially intelligent creature” — not a substitute for the player, but a being whose independent existence only confirms her total subjugation to the rules of the game and its designer. Lorna is not an instrument. She is an artificial woman-made-instrument.

As Hershman stated in her 1994 essay, “truth is precisely based on the inauthentic.” The inauthentic exposes the designed choices in video games and in other life-like fictions.

— Haena Chu

Stuff for Study: Reading Player One

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• We’re more ghosts than people: on heaven within Red Dead Redemption — Hanif Abdurraqib for The Paris Review

• Sid Meier and the meaning of Civilization — Neima Jahromi for The New Yorker

• The allure of the video games apocalypse — Will Wiles for Aeon

• Clash rules everything around me: on wasted time — Tony Tulathimutte for Real Life

• Asking Claude to re-build Star Trek — Paul Taylor for The London Review of Books

• The art of the longplay — Alex Wennerberg for The Empty Cup

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Thu, July 2nd: ATTENTION LAB: STUDY is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!

• Mon, July 6th: Join us for our IRL seminar ANIMAL PHENOMENOLOGY, where we will attend to creatures and present ways of understanding non-human life-worlds. Enroll HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

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The photograph on the last page shows a car at the side of the road. In the backseat, a woman reclines with the cheek of a boy pressed against her shoulder, their faces misted with sleep. Outside the window, a flat and dusty desert stretches to a mountainous horizon, but mother and child pay no mind to the wide-open country. They are enclosed in their cabin, swaddled in quiet, unsuspecting of cameras, dreaming unknowable dreams.

In 1955, a 31-year-old photographer named Robert Frank won a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the United States. Setting out from New York, he crisscrossed the continent with a camera in the passenger seat of his black Ford Business Coupe, pulling over long enough to capture what he saw and then keep moving, a restless, taciturn Swiss immigrant composing his adoptive country exposure by exposure: Philadelphia, Detroit, Savannah, Houston, Reno, San Francisco, and the long, lonely stretches of road in between. On some legs of the trip, his wife, Mary, and their young children, Andrea and Pablo, travelled with him. Cops eyed him with suspicion: a foreigner with a camera, and Jewish too. He was thrown in jail in Arkansas and chased out of a small town in Tennessee. In total, he took some 28,000 pictures. Of these, a selection of 83 were published as The Americans, which became one of the most celebrated photo collections of the twentieth century.

But not all at once; it took years for The Americans to find a receptive audience. A Parisian press was the first to print it, and when the book was finally released in the United States (with an introduction by the novelist Jack Kerouac), sales were poor and critics were unimpressed. They derided Frank’s photos as sloppy and blurry, with “drunken horizons.” They supposed that he hated this place – so why didn’t he leave?

In time, though, his glowing jukeboxes and blond starlets and leather-clad bikers came to be recognized as prescient visions of America’s self-ascribed mythos. The Americans shows a people in motion, the grimacing, blinking, half-obscured contradictions of democratic life in its mottled glory.

The nation is a simplifying fiction; it blankets vast and varied maps with a single identity. In doing so, it purports to tell us the essence of places we have never been. This is what Frank did with his pictures: by setting them together, he made us believe we could see beyond the edge of each frame. He fashioned his American fiction from close attention to the world past his windshield, and then he taught us how to do it for ourselves. Frank never went to Biloxi, Mississippi, but after seeing his work, one can imagine how Biloxi might have looked through his Leica. His photos suggest that America is a way of seeing as much as it is a thing to be seen.

Yet one image – the last in the collection – rubs against this unifying vision: a woman and a child sleeping in the backseat of a car. The woman, of course, is Mary Frank. The boy is her son, Pablo. One suspects little Andrea is in there, snoozing somewhere out of view. They are accustomed by now to these frequent stops; they have spent plenty of time waiting at the side of the road, watching the artist point that little box of his at the parade, the burial ground, the motorcycle show, the baptism. Do they sense a thing called America coming into view? Do they see what he sees? Do they care?

U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, the image caption reads: just another stop. But this time, the artist has turned his camera toward the car. He lets us see who’s been sitting in the backseat all the while. They are, perhaps, the only people in this entire collection of photographs who know the name of the man who took their picture. Yet here they are, on equal footing with everyone else in these pages – as democracy would have it. They must be the Americans, too.

The Americans was published in 1959. In 1969, Robert and Mary divorced. In 1974, Andrea died in a plane crash in Guatemala. Pablo, who suffered from schizophrenia, died by suicide in 1994. It’s possible the factory worker in Detroit and the priest in Baton Rouge met tragic ends, too, though Frank would know as well as we do – which is not at all. He needed his subjects to be anonymous. The forms of attention that conjure the identity of a people are not the forms of attention that honor the specificity of a person. Problem is, we need both. A people without persons is a dangerous abstraction. A person without a people lacks the fastenings of obligation that make us whole. Both tend, in their extremes, toward violence.

The challenge of democracy is to reconcile these ways of seeing. Can free, self-governing individuals make up a nation? Can we exist fully unto ourselves and also fully unto others? The Americans does not resolve the question, but it does put us behind the viewfinder of a man who embodied its contradictions. Immigrant, artist, husband, father. Frank went searching for America, and that’s what his photos portray: a determined, possibly interminable, searching. It’s why they feel so sad, and so full of hope.

It’s also why they seem, half a century later, to capture the truth of this place. Insofar as America exists, it exists in our will to find it. It is a mode of attention that dares to encounter divergent realities without collapsing them – an attention that is the thing it seeks. Frank made no exclusive claim to this kind of vision. His crooked angles and fuzzy focus disavow technical expertise and signal that his pursuit is ours, too. Take a page from Frank’s book. Go looking for America, and you’re already there.

Peter Schmidt is the Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn.

To resist toxic UX, we must first understand it. Why is it so hard to stop an infinite scroll? Why is your thumb already twitching when your phone buzzes in your pocket? Drawing on the work of Jenny Odell, Neil Postman, and others, Ashley and Henry discuss: How do these UX techniques operate on the body? How do they narrow consciousness? What possibilities of attention do they foreclose?

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A twelve-hour and fourteen minute YouTube video entitled Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~ on the channel FCPlaythrough has 1.3 million views. It consists of the player completing the 2004 Pokemon game in its entirety: going to every building, talking to every non-player character, and finishing every side quest – silently and with no commentary.

“Longplays” – comprehensive recorded playthroughs of video games – are created primarily for archival purposes. One can download an old video game’s game file, but longplays preserve the game experience. The resulting artifacts, as one might expect, are long. On YouTube, among the tens of thousands of longplays created by volunteer archivists, you can watch 9 hours of Minecraft, 23 hours of Super Mario Odyssey, or even 39 hours of Pokemon Black and White 2.

Aside from the editors themselves, few people watch longplays in their entirety. I asked Alec Foster of the YouTube channel AL82Retrogaming about his audience retention stats, and he said that most viewers drop off after a few minutes, “looking for a quick fix of nostalgia.” Others, commonly, watch longplays as “second-screen content.” As one commenter writes, “I always use this video as background noise when studying. There’s something so soothing and calming listening to a game I played so heavily as a kid.” Other commenters mention watching them to go to sleep, or in the background on long car rides.

Longplays are, in some sense, films. Their construction is intentional, and they are heavily edited to demonstrate the entirety of a game as completely and efficiently as possible: usually random mishaps are removed from the final product. The result is intended to be, as distinct from raw gameplay footage, at least somewhat watchable. But broadly speaking, longplays don’t exactly seek to entertain, but rather, to exhibit a game.

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I wanted to experience a longplay as, essentially, an incidental art film. To this end, I watched Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~ in its entirety. I gave it my full attention: six hours each day, no distractions except my notebook, each session broken up by a one hour lunch break.

Broadly speaking, this “film” is uneventful. Most of Pokemon involves repetitive actions like battling or walking around that provide little interest to a passive viewer. It does not resemble a conventional narrative film, but rather the “durational cinema” of avant-garde artists, like Andy Warhol and his eight-hour long Empire, which consists of nothing but a static shot of the Empire State Building, or Wavelength, with its extended zoom of an artist’s loft. “Durational cinema,” like Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~, gives little purchase to the viewer’s attention. In other words, it is a bit boring.

Boredom, however, is sometimes an essential, even fruitful aspect of a work of art. Andreas Elpidorou and John Gibson note in their essay “Really Boring Art” that people generally accept that a work of art can make us feel “negative” emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, or despair, but balk at the idea that art could be intentionally boring. But boredom has some interesting characteristics. It is, of course, broadly unpleasant, but can serve to transform our relationship to a piece. As they write, “the perceived meaningless or felt blahness of an experience can propel the bored subject to reappraise the object, look for occluded dimensions of significance, and, generally put, righten one’s relationship to one’s situation.” Boredom motivates a different kind of attention.

My viewing of Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay inverted the regular experience of playing the game. The interactive components (battling Pokemon) became repetitive and uninteresting. My attention instead shifted towards the game’s “decoration” – the “unnecessary” parts: the beautiful pixel art scenery, the characters whose dialog does not advance the plot, but simply adds character to the world. I found myself, after long periods of boredom, genuinely excited when I simply got to see something new, or hear dialogue from a new set of non-player characters. The narrative crescendo, where legendary Pokemon battle to plunge the world into eternal sun or rain, became, genuinely, moving and impressive.

Unlike feelings of anger, irritation, or sadness, boredom is an emotion that platforms like YouTube generally seek to completely eliminate. “Doomscrollers” stay online, but bored users, who log off and do something else, are totally unacceptable to a business model based on sustained attention. To intentionally seek boredom online is to rebel against the psychological demands of the attention economy, which seeks to hold our attention as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

As Jenny Odell writes in “Who Has Time for Parsifal” about the four-and-a-half hour Wagner opera, marathon-length artistic experiences can transform our relationship towards time, allowing it to become, rather than a measurable resource that we worry about “spending” or “losing,” a succession of abundant moments to be experienced, savored. It is precisely because Parsifal is so long that it has this capability: it prompts us to let go of the idea that our time is something to be “used effectively.”

In order to experience marathon-length art, we must, as she says, let go of our mind’s tendencies of “working, grasping, and analyzing.” It was on the second day of my watchthrough that I found myself able to do this. It was as if my mind, after struggling for hours in search of something to occupy itself, finally gave up and submitted itself to a lower base level of stimulation, a more open experience of time.

In The Pale King, a novel about the IRS with no shortage of highly technical, boring passages about tax accounting, David Foster Wallace writes that boredom “is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” Some young people seem to agree, partaking in the social media trend of “rawdogging boredom,” where they perform various feats such as staring silently at a blank wall, or, in BWong’s account, doing nothing on an eighteen hour flight. After many hours of Pokemon Emerald, not only did the “film” itself start to be, as Odell puts it, “a reprieve, a gift, and an invitation,” it also did feel like, afterwards, this feat of endurance made smaller things somewhat sweeter. Washing dishes or making dinner, for example, after so many hours in a chair, became a pleasantly embodied experience.

The aesthetic rewards of Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~ – a renewed appreciation for this twenty-year-old game, an acceptance of a different relationship with time, the satisfaction of psychological endurance, were only accessible after the endurance of large amounts of boredom, after letting go of my struggle for stimulation and entering a kind of submission to whatever simply is. Perhaps we can endeavor to seek out more experiences that might be boring with a bit more lightness and ease, experiences where, in the words of one of the characters in Pokemon Emerald’s Route 116: “We’ve got nothing to do but loll around here doing nothing.”

Alex Wennerberg is a software engineer who occasionally writes about technology, philosophy and culture.

These days, “sports” tends to be synonymous with capitalist spectacle. Soccer pitches and basketball arenas, often named after friendly neighborhood corporations, are plastered with emblems of oil and tech sponsorship. Televised viewing is punctuated with A/B-tested advertising filled with celebrity cameos and cars speeding through all-terrain scenarios. Judging by the view from the JumboTron, it’s easy to suspect that sports are just another vehicle of consumption.

But it’s also the case that the electricity in the air before a big game can’t be explained by viral commercials or the greedy churn of prediction markets. It wasn’t a corporate bottom line that compelled a college marching band in Kansas to learn and play the Algerian national anthem during a World Cup (otherwise) tainted by xenophobic immigration policies. Last Saturday, New York City’s collective groans, gasps, and, finally, eruptions of joy as the Knicks ended a 50-year championship drought revealed the underlying simplicity of our devotion to the tradition of sport. Sometimes, it can really just be about a ball, a game, a team, and a city.

In this issue, we’re talking SPORTS. How are these contests such a powerful practice of collective attention? What can sports teach us about being in the world with each other? In Visions of Attention, Haena turns back the clock to the mythology of Mesoamerican ball games. In Practice in Practice, Peter walks us through a practice of witnessing in New York City — in five phases, of course. And in Stuff for Study, I share Ross Gay’s ode to pickup basketball and an exploration of the improvisational ties between jazz and soccer.

Read on!

Yours in regulation time,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

Matters of Life and Death

If you thought the citywide uproar in New York after the Knicks’ game 5 was shocking, remember that sports were once a matter of life and death for some of those who came before us — from the legend of runner Pheidippides, who died of exhaustion after announcing the Athenian victory over Persia (inspiring today’s marathon), to the hypothesis that soccer originates from medieval British “mob football” where severed heads were tossed around after battles (apocryphal? It seems likely…).

Instead of wiping these grisly moments from memory, some instinct drove us to repeat and rehearse them through sport in an endless more-or-less-sublimated “battle” that magically continues to fascinate crowds. Mesoamerican ball games are one striking example of sports as something like cosmic renewal. Played in pairs or teams hitting a ball with their bodies, but not their hand or feet, to shoot it through a hoop (sound familiar?), these games were a shared ceremonial ritual in Aztec and Mayan cities.

According to the Popol Vuh, mythological text of the Kʼicheʼ Maya people, Maize God (Hun Hunahpu) and his brother Hunahpu annoyed the gods by playing a loud game of ball, and were sent to Xibalba (the underworld), where they lost a game and were sacrificed. Miraculously, the now deceased Maize God was able to sire twins (we won’t go into the specifics), Hunahpu and Xbalanque. The twins tragically repeated their father and uncle’s mistake and were also dragged to Xibalba to play a ball game. This time, they won, and after trials and tribulations (including jumping into fire), they escaped the underworld alongside their father. Who knows what terrors might have visited the city if this year’s NBA championship had shaken out differently? In sports, as in life, we take our happy endings knowing that death always gets us in the end.

— Haena Chu

Practice in Practice

Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism

“We talkin’ about practice.”
- Allen Iverson, Attention Activist

It’s a game for them, but it’s a Practice for us.

The parameters of this Practice are unwritten but universally understood: Gather with your friends. Strangers, too. Sports bars are good and block parties are better, but a pizza place or even a corner deli with a TV broadcast will do just fine. You will likely be standing. If you are sitting, you will be required to jump to your feet. The Practice does not take place in silence — though you are welcome to try.

Approximate duration: three hours. Depends on the refs, stoppage time, etc; attentional endurance is to be pursued at all costs. Sensory modes: visual, auditory, somatic. Keep your eye on the ball, but don’t neglect the weakside shooter (that’s how they got us in the first half). You are encouraged to breathe. This may prove difficult. Breathe anyway.

Collective attention, we like to say, is the stuff of shared reality. Does that sound abstract? Academic? Try this. At 11:34pm, open your window or step into your street. Close your eyes. Attend, at seventeen seconds past the minute, to the exultant roar of five boroughs catapulted to the heights of ecstasy. When was the last time so many people in this city put their minds and senses in the same place? When was the last time you could hold a perfect stranger in your arms like this?

Once complete, return home. Rest up. The value of Practice, after all, is in consistency. This one is meant to be completed — but only five times, please. Six, if we want it at home.

— Peter Schmidt

Stuff for Study: Reading the Playbook

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• The referee in the machine: what data does to the beautiful game — Brendan O’Connor for The Baffler

• Have I even told you yet about the courts I love? — Ross Gay for Literary Hub

• The improvisational wonders of jazz and soccer — Michael Agovino for Los Angeles Review of Books

• How sports betting rewired a generation’s relationship to risk – on Substack

• All eyes on the ball — D. Graham Burnett for Cabinet

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Sat, June 20th: Join us for a gathering of performances and presentations by members of boshi’s place, with Everest Pipkin, assistant professor at Pratt University. RSVP HERE!

• Tue, June 23rd: ATTENTION LAB: COALITION is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!

• Wed, June 24th: Join us for our IRL seminar PUPPETS!, where we’ll study and combine theory, hands-on puppet making, and group puppeteering. Enroll HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. How did this transformation develop in laboratories, and how are attention activists today breaking open the frame? Speculative psychotechnics traces the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. At Julian’s upcoming seminar at SoRA, students will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

SPECULATIVE PSYCHOTECHNICS, an in-person seminar, begins on June 20th. Enroll HERE!

In this installment of OFFICE HOURS, SoRA academic dean Henry R. Kramer sits down with to chat about his upcoming seminar, THE PARTY.

The party is one of the most powerful and least examined human technologies. Something happens at parties that resists description: a loosening, a possibility, an encounter that couldn't have been planned. And yet parties have shaped history more than most textbooks admit — movements are born at parties, love affairs that changed the world began on dance floors, political formations crystallized around a shared table.

Henry and kyle turn their attention toward the party as a social and political form. What defines it? What separates a party from a gathering or a scene from a moment? How can parties be designed to encourage certain kinds of attention — and what kinds most naturally emerge?

THE PARTY, an in-person seminar, begins on June 11th. Enroll HERE!

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Machines, it seems, can read. Plug a news article or an epic poem into an LLM and it will unfurl a tightly structured gloss with bulleted takeaways and sunny suggestions for further prompting. This new technology has plenty of implications, one of the more troubling of which (at least for those of us who care about this stuff) is that, before long, people won’t need to read at all, since machines will do it for us.

Will this happen? We’ll see. But until such time, questions remain about what exactly we mean by “reading,” and whether the data-intensive churn-and-burn operation of our modern day computers truly fits that description.

For instance: we know that LLMs can process text prompts with extraordinary speed. What happens when we remove the prompt? Can there be reading in the absence of text? Machines seem to be able to read everything, but can they read nothing? Can we?

An experiment, then: What follows is a selection of blank spaces, each scanned from the margins of a different page of text. Each will be the subject of a close reading. My intent is to assay absence as a source of meaning and to understand, by extension, whether there are forms of reading not yet reproducible by machines. Perhaps these spaces — the blank ones, plus any other spaces beyond the enclosure of computation – deserve more of our attention.

In that spirit:

1.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Tr. Damion Searls (Liveright, 2024) pg. 181

This blank appears on page 181 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the German philosopher’s masterwork, and the only book he published during his lifetime. The Tractatus takes the form of a series of numbered propositions (ex. “A logical image can depict the world”) that define the scope and limits of analytical logic. The blank in question is an important one; its upper edge borders text (the Tractatus’ famous and final pronouncement: “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent”), and its bottom edge marks the end of the book.

What does this blank do? For one thing, it makes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus finite. It marks the conclusion of his thought. It permits his text to declare: I have said everything I intended to say, and now I surrender myself to you, the reader.

This is a funny maneuver for a work that seeks to be so totalizing in its precision, but it’s also appropriate: the Tractatus is about the limits of logic-in-the-form-of-language. The words on the page describe those limits, but the blanks are the limits.

Blanks, then, achieve what Wittgenstein’s language can only gesture toward. They are the silence of the “things we cannot speak.”

2.

Youn, Monica. “In the Passive Voice,” From From. (Graywolf Press, 2024) pg. 96

This blank is one of many blanks that stitch together Monica Youn’s “In the Passive Voice.” The poem, which is written in an inquisitive and uneasy first-person, threads a range of topics (sharks’ teeth, quantification, hate crimes, coins, Ovid, etc.) across forty-four pages. It’s a case study in Hannah Arendt’s observation that “Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is brought about poetically.”

Strangely, though, the paragraphs in “Passive Voice” don’t quite fit together. If a thrifty and overzealous editor were to compress the poem into a continuous essay, without breaks, Youn’s clarity of style might be enough to whisk the reader from top to bottom, but the piece would lose its perplexing unity of thought. That effect comes not from the text per se but from its discontinuities. It happens in the blank spaces.

Consider the above. The line of text above this blank is a comment on the grammatical tense of a previous line: “‘Is assumed’ is in the passive voice,” Youn writes. On the page following the blank, Youn writes about Korean Americans’ role as a demographic buffer for white-vs-black racial violence.

It’s a change of subject — sort of. But Youn’s note about passive vs. active verb tenses avoids getting lost in the transition to other matters, since the sizable blank that follows this remark gives it space and time to breathe. As a result, in the paragraphs to come (and the discussions of systemic violence therein), the reader is extra attentive to verbs and subjects and the ways that the passive voice can obscure harm and responsibility.

The use of blanks in Youn’s poem allows her ideas to hang loose at one end, which allows us (the readers) to grab them. It makes them into strands for our own weaving. The reason we don’t see Youn pulling everything together is that she isn’t the one doing the pulling. What she has done is provided the materials, and, just as importantly, enough empty space to work in. The best magicians let the audience do magic for them.

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3.

Blank rotated 90º clockwise

The Economist, 15 March 2025 (pg. 36-7).

This blank from The Economist’s March 15^th issue links two articles about econometrically dubious claims to a “revolution” in Ethiopian wheat production (pg. 36) and reports of the worsening conditions for civil war in precarious South Sudan (pg. 37). These events don’t seem to have any causal relationship – at least, none that’s mentioned in the text. But their inclusion in the same section (Middle East & Africa) and issue (March 15^th) of the magazine implies that they are relevant to the same readers for the same reason: they’re world news.

The idea that “the world” encompasses Ethiopian wheat, South Sudanese guns, and readers of The Economist seems obvious. Such is the unspoken logic of world news: that there is one world (i.e., the globe), and the goings-on in any single part of it can be the concern of anybody, anywhere else.

This wasn’t always self-evident. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the new media forms of the novel and the newspaper changed how people thought about time and space. By putting simultaneous but apparently unrelated events on the same page, novels and newspapers created a shared frame of reference in which those events (and the people involved) could be seen (and could see themselves) as participants in a common timeline. Simultaneity became a source of shared identity. This allowed the useful fiction of “the nation” to be conjured from people who, for all purposes, lived in totally different realities.

Anderson’s account suggests that national identity emerged as a sort of literary fiction. Perhaps our global frame of reference arose in similar ways. But if this impression of a linked destiny was once fictional, it is a fiction that has proven self-fulfilling. Ethiopian wheat is connected to South Sudanese conflict, and both are connected to readers of financial magazines. What links the events in these pages is the web of global capital that The Economist, liberalism’s most loyal periodical, has cheered into existence.

This universalizing work happens outside the text, in the empty spaces that join scattered reports and make them into a single story. What this blank represents is the flow of money that encircles our planet; what it asserts is that capitalism is coterminous with the world.

4.

Grocery List (May 8^th, 2026)

This blank separates the sections of my last week’s grocery list: produce and dairy are above the space, and dry/canned goods are below. I learned the technique from my fiancée. Dividing a bunch of ingredients into related categories lets me move through the grocery store and cross items off my list one bunch at a time. No need to zig-zag from bell peppers past aisles one through eight to parmesan cheese, and then back to nab the cilantro.

Not exactly rocket science. But I used to list ingredients in the order that they appeared in the week’s three or four recipes, and my trips to the store would take twice as long. Now, entries of one yellow onion and two yellow onions become a single entry of three yellow onions, right next to the kale. Separate recipes become one big, undifferentiated haul.

What does this blank do? It gives order to a mundane task and saves me time on a Sunday morning. You could even say it creates a correspondence between the structure of the list and the layout of the store.

But set aside the clever stuff. What really matters, for the purposes of this evening, is that I have forgotten the shallots, and that the blank allows my beloved to fill in this oversight with her looping script before the list goes from the refrigerator door to my back pocket. With text, as with one’s own life, it is the empty spaces that allow other people to enter, and to make it their own.

Peter Schmidt is Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn.

In the online Bible reading group I attended during the pandemic, a visiting professor of theology made an offhand comment in his lecture on Genesis that I’ve been thinking about ever since: “If the Bible has a metanarrative,” he said, “it is the movement of humanity toward divine rest.”

This is a counterintuitive reading of a famously eventful book. Still, I remember being moved by the notion that rest is the nearest one can come to godliness. My fiancée, who is from languorous Rio de Janeiro, understands this in her bones: Sundays are for horizontality. My cultural background, in contrast, is definitively WASPish, so while I find the idea attractive in theory, I find it harder to put into practice. I prefer to be in motion.

Rest is sometimes taken to mean stillness — in which case I would be failing the Genesis test. But if we think of rest more broadly, as any activity that resists the reduction of humanity to its labor power, then the aperture of rest opens onto a world of movement: of dance, of wandering, of running for the sheer thrill of speed. This restful motion (of the body, and also of the minds and senses) is the kind of stuff kids do. It is the kind of stuff adults do, too, if we are lucky.

In this issue, we turn our attention to rest. In Visions of Attention, Haena tunes into the experiments of minimalist composers Alvin Lucier and William Basinski. In Stuff for Study, Czarina shares explorations of rest on public benches and in Margaritaville. And in IRL, we highlight the events kicking off our summer semester.

Reposedly yours,

Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

Restless Loops

I am sitting in a room.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now…

Early minimalist composer Alvin Lucier really was sitting in a room when he recorded this in 1969, but the self-referentiality doesn’t end here — a tape recorder sat across from him, below a speaker that played his speech back in real time, over and over and over. At about two dozen cycles, you notice the recording start to elongate. By the end of the piece, words and syllables are stretched into unintelligible whale calls by the resonant properties of the room itself. Every room has its own resonant properties, including the one you’re sitting in. Most of the time, these properties go unnoticed. But Lucier lets them erupt into conscious attention through the simple technique of repetition.

In 2002, William Basinski looped a single melodic line across the span of an hour using a similar scenario. About thirty minutes in, certain sections have dimmed out, eventually giving way to choppy, trembling fragments. By the end, only a low hum vibrates — one that had been vibrating in the “background” (if there is such a thing in music) all along, like some kind of cosmic background radiation. This is the sound of the physical cracks on the ferrite tape that fell apart as Basinski attempted to digitize recordings he had made in the 1980s. What we hear in Basinski’s work is the deterioration of a musical phrase across the length of an album. But we also hear the death of a physical medium that had laid latent throughout the decades.

Eventually, every medium will be laid to rest. But something restless stirs in their afterlives. These two pieces by Alvin Lucier and William Basinski, released almost four decades apart, foreground the material conditions hidden in the act of recording music: Lucier with air, and Basinski with tape. This focus on the conditions of speech and music reveal that our well-ordered auditory world is simply the tip of a sonic iceberg that smoothly sinks into an amorphous sea of sound.

— Haena Chu

Stuff for Study: Rest Notes

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• The rest cure and the working body — Alicia Puglionesi for Aeon

• What is time for? — Zena Hitz for Plough

• The disappearance of the public bench — Gabrielle Bruney for Places

• Margaritaville and the myth of American leisure — Jaya Saxena for Eater

• We can learn in our sleep. Should we? — Shayla Love for The New Yorker

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Thu, June 4th: Join us to celebrate the opening of Beyond Dark Flow: an exhibition that explores games as digital and physical spaces. RSVP HERE!

• Thu, June 11th: Join us for our IRL seminar THE PARTY, where we’ll study and practice — examining parties that made history, from Studio 54 to Harlem rent parties to Enlightenment salons. Enroll HERE!

• Sat, June 13th: ATTENTION LAB: SANCTUARY is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

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NP: You just finished teaching a seminar at SoRA called COMPLEXITY. I took the class, and wasn’t sure what to expect going in: “complexity” sounds, well, complicated, and pretty abstract. So let’s start there. What does complexity mean to you, and why is it important?

ABL: We often associate complexity with a vague, overwhelming sense of “a lot going on.” But I’m referring to something more specific. My interest comes from Complex Systems Science, or what’s often called “Complexity Theory.” It’s a broad field that studies how systems at all scales – from molecules to global economies – self-organize and exhibit emergent behavior. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” That’s the essence of complexity. Smaller, interacting parts create something entirely new without a central planner.

There are a lot of useful ideas from this field, but the insight I find most compelling is that complexity exists in a sweet spot between order and chaos. You need enough order to retain organization, yet enough chaos to allow for adaptation and surprise. Too much order makes a system overly rigid; too much chaos makes it incoherent. Complexity is the dynamic dance between the two. In a universe of total order, nothing could be otherwise. In a universe of total chaos, nothing could be. To sustain creative, adaptive life, you need that dance.

In the course at SoRA, we explored complexity as a way of living in that in-between space: learning to work with and embody the uncertain nature of complexity rather than fearing it. That shift has been helpful for how I live and attend to the world, so I was eager to explore concepts in complexity with other attention-minded people.

NP: Can you speak a little more to how we might do that? How we might occupy that “space between?”

ABL: Yes. Complexity is not the enemy of life; it enables life!

There are different levels at which you can engage with this study. It can provide a technical explanation for how the world works, but for most people, complexity can serve as a broader lens for looking at the world.

Our scientific paradigms often shape how we organize our world, so I’m interested in what the complexity paradigm implies for how we live. In many ways, it provides a counter to our more traditional reductionist paradigm that dissects the world into parts. The complexity paradigm suggests that we embrace complementarity, holding two seemingly contradictory truths at once without forcing a resolution. It asks us to attend to what the system as a whole is doing by watching the relationships and flows rather than just aiming at a fixed goal. And it invites us to remain open to noise, error, surprise – to counter the impulse to optimize and flatten.

NP: That rhymes with some conversations I’ve been having in my Attention Activism 201 course at SoRA. We see a constant dance in organizing spaces between the desire to plan and the instinct to surrender to emergence. How do you see complexity theory supplementing these movement-building efforts?

ABL: Complexity gets at a lot of ideas we feel intuitively. Studying the dynamics of complex systems is helpful because it provides specificity to those ideas. It helps us understand how to build systems that actually work towards emergence.

That dance between structure and open-endedness feels important for any attempt at social change. We often place more emphasis on the plan, the strategy, with a “solve the problem” mindset. But complexity teaches us that it can be counterintuitive to try to solve chaos with order, or to rely on purely top-down solutions.

If you map everything out without allowing space for emergence and paying attention to the relational dynamics, you can actually hasten a system’s demise. We see that often in the natural sciences: If you plant trees in perfect, uniform rows to maximize timber yield, you optimize for one goal, but you destroy the soil and the biodiversity that enabled the forest. The ecosystem collapses because it lacks the complexity to adapt – and because the planners didn’t see the value of the relationships.

In more human and social contexts, I think navigating the tension between the two requires more creative thinking. Maybe you treat the plan not as a rigid script, but as a flexible hypothesis. You set a direction but build in regular moments to reassess the system and adjust course based on where the energy is actually moving. By embracing complexity, we can widen the conversation beyond simple binaries of problem vs. solution.

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NP: So, on that note, what do you think about the conversations people have in this attention activism space – about the ways people are transforming their relationships to technology and so forth?

ABL: I hear a lot of talk about “online vs. offline,” which feels stuck in a binary. If we fixate solely on a device as the problem, we get a fairly narrow range of solutions, rather than considering the broader ecology of factors that inform how we engage with phones and attention.

I’m certainly not an expert on this topic, but seeing the discourse around policy changes like the Kids Online Safety Act and age restrictions to social media, I wonder if enacting a top-down solution without considering the underlying ecology could inadvertently create negative outcomes. It’s addressing a part of the problem (that children’s capacities for attention are being hijacked) but in doing so, it could create a host of other problems, like mass surveillance. This isn’t to say policy change isn’t useful. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that if we have a limited conversation around these topics, we risk tilting into binaries that are easier to politicize or co-opt.

If we take a complexity approach, we’d focus on how local conditions influence system-wide behavior. What is a person’s lived experience? How does their relationship to the internet impact the texture of their lives and relationships? Paying attention to those factors is what SoRA seems focused on – understanding our own relationships to attention and being curious about it, rather than keeping the conversation at “I’m addicted to my phone; this is bad.”

NP: There’s a line in Attensity! that talks about how all of our individual enthusiasms might “jump together” – that is, to become something that is greater than the sum of its parts [p. 143] ...

ABL: I love the idea of cultivating a shared sensibility from which solutions can emerge. What if you don’t come up with a precise strategy but trust that having a lot of people thinking in an aligned way creates new conditions? Maybe that creates a whole group of people not wanting to be as online, and that ripples out.

This feels riskier, but uncertainty is actually a feature of complex systems. From initial starting conditions, you cannot predict the outcome, but that’s usually when the most resilient and expansive structures emerge. So I think cultivating a willingness to include the unknown and encourage emergence may lead us to the solution, instead of us trying to figure the solution out ahead of time. We need some planning, yes, but we need a lot more room for the unexpected.

NP: Attention Activism emphasizes the collective study and practice of attention – how we can start to think in new ways and build new ways of being together. I hear that you have something similar in the works. Would you like to share with our readers?

ABL: I was so inspired by this cohort and how we seemed to develop a kind of shared mode of thought. I’ve studied complexity on my own, but it was incredibly generative to develop a shared language with others to translate these ideas into our lives and projects.

There is so much in the realm of complexity. You can get deep into the weeds with concepts like fractals and phase transitions and new forms of logic. Initial readings only scratch the surface. I think these concepts can bring a whole new lens to how we live, create, and organize, so I’m starting an ongoing Complexity Lab of sorts. It will be a bit like a reading-and-practice group, where we focus on an idea and then experiment with applying the idea to whatever we’re working on. “School as medium” is such a good frame. I want to be in school-shaped things with people forever!

NP: How can someone get involved in Complexity Lab?

ABL: Email me [annabethlane@proton.me] if you’re interested in these ideas or hearing about when we meet. Anyone is welcome to join our possibility space!

The past few days in New York City saw the return of summer: stoops, lawns, street corners, and park benches came alive with human activity. Joining the usual ambient soundtrack of trundling subways, occasional car horns, and distant sirens were the cheers and groans accompanying the Mets and Yankees series, reggaeton from a boom box, and cautious parents calling after their newly bike-mobile children to stop at the crosswalk. This might sound like conditions for sensory overload — or, it might just be the perfect site for STUDY.

In An Attempt at Exhausting A Place in Paris, novelist and filmmaker Georges Perec fixed his attention on a singular locale to observe the infraordinary, defined by Perec as “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” Throughout the course of his project, Perec documented “small poodle-type dog,” “wholesale potatoes,” and various buses along their routes. As the title to the project alludes, the occurrences of “nothings” seem infinite. It is harder to exhaust a place than one might think.

Extending creative study into the world is core to our work of realizing the radical possibilities of attention. In this special issue of The Empty Cup, we’re inviting you to a SUMMER OF STUDY, wherever you might be. We’ve asked members of our team to share their sites of study and the thinkers that inspire their chosen locales, and now we’re extending the invitation to YOU. Let us know where (and what) you’ll be studying in the comments — and invite others to join you!

Locally yours,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Where Are You Studying This Summer?

We asked members of the SoRA team about their summer study plans (when they’re not hard at work running our excellent summer programming, of course). Read about the trails, trains, and hotel lobbies where they’ll be reflecting on Donna Haraway, NBA Basketball, and children.

kyle barnes
Faculty, Study Corps

This summer, you’ll find me at…
The Prospect Park dog beach, where I can roll around my pearl of jealousy while watching the dogs cool off and go about their business, without even a clue what the words “AI agent”, “invoice” or “climate change” mean.

I’ll be thinking about…
Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: the Disorder of Desire and Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet.

Quinn Marchman
Lab Facilitator

My site of study will be…
The Highbridge Trail, the perfect mix of nature and massive infrastructure. The special moment when standing over the Harlem River and you can see planes, trains, automobiles and boats (especially the Columbia crew teams). The last stop on the subway to finish reading a book. Getting out to explore the neighborhoods around it. The D train to Norwood is my favorite so far.

On my study curriculum are…
W.E.B Du Bois, Olivia Dean, Hanif Abdurraqib, The Bible, Assata Shakur, NBA Playoff Basketball.

Ali Lim
Designer

This summer, my study plans are to…
Stop by Tashkent Market before lunch where I’ll pick up food from their extensive selection of hot food before heading to Brighton Beach for the day, where I’ll contemplate life and soak up the sun. The heat flares up my eczema, but it’s worth it. I’m usually listening to music, reading, or watching people. If others are with me it’s an opportunity to have a deep conversation — and one of us is probably having a beer.

I’ll be thinking about…
Joaquín Sorolla because his work captures the color of summer and water. Unfortunately Sean Baker because of Anora, but I kind of despise him. Viktor Tsoi and Kino.

Richard Dent IV
Facilitator and Study Corps

Where you’ll find me:
There’s a little grove in Prospect Park on the south eastern corner that I am aiming to collect more frequently for my studies. Gas logs to sit on, trees to climb, feels great.

Here, I’ll be studying…
Walt Whitman.

Gwendolyn Olton
Organizing Lead

This summer…
I have two sites of study! The first is every conifer tree within a two block radius of my house on the east side of the city of Rochester. I’ve been studying them while I walk for months and have a ridiculous project in mind of trying to draw every single one of them this summer.

My second site is the Strong National Museum of Play. I find this place to be amazing, joyful, and a really challenging sensory overload — sometimes all at once. They take the study of play extremely seriously and have a toy hall of fame that includes cardboard boxes. This summer, I want to spend a little more time there, again, drawing some of the amazing exhibits but also just experiencing being in one of the most unique museums I’ve ever been in.

I’m taking inspiration from…
Jason Polan, who had the much more ambitious project of drawing everyone in NYC. He reached 50k before he died in 2020! The Power of Fun by Catherine Price. This quote from Lynda Barry, “That’s what a drawing is, a record of how your human hand is moving and the traces it left behind.”

Jahony Germosen
Partnerships Coordinator

You’ll find me studying…
The subway during rush hours. Watching others prepare for the beginning/end of their day is a reminder of how we are all just individuals living in a world much bigger than all of us. I see men taking calls underground (somehow?), children in uniforms, women in scrubs, older ladies with their big baskets, teenagers struggling to stay awake, and many in search of their next meal.

Through this study I am reminded of how special the city is and how unique yet intertwined all of our lives really are. No headphones, no book, just your eyes bouncing around the train cart very slowly.

Jonathan Gershberg
Facilitator and Study Corps

My summertime site of study will be…
My soon-to-be-born child’s nursery nook (we have a one bedroom so it’s not a full room, but plenty of space for an infant).

I’ve been thinking a lot about…
Tim Wu’s thinking on how human beings are being extracted from, our attention and money and data and time harvested for private corporate profit. With a new child, I am reckoning with how horrifying this reality is, and how we can organize to change it for my kid and all of our kids.

Eleanor Lambert
Study Coordinator

This summer, I’ll be attending to…
Hawk activity in Greenwood Cemetery; my partner’s Baba’s amazing garden in Bolechowice, Poland ; from my kiddie pool on my building’s outdoor 4th floor space; trying out the ferry ride to Rockaway Beach (instead of/in comparison with the train!)

I’m thinking about questions inspired by…
Báyò Akómoláfé, Joshua Schrei, and Sophie Strand — what does it mean to be human in ecologies of more-than-human beings? What happens when I put other beings, other relations, at the center of (my) devotional attention?

Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief

You’ll find me studying at…
The lobby of the Ace Hotel on Schermerhorn St. There’s a table area that’s good for reading and a couch area that’s good for chatting. On Friday evenings, the vibe shifts from studious/productive to festive — DJ’s start spinning at 8pm.

On my curriculum at the moment is…
MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut.

D. Graham Burnett
Publisher

This summer I’m studying…
Sound in space, with my dear friend and collaborator Julian Chehirian, an installation artist and historian of the mind sciences. We’re doing a residency together out at Pioneer Works, making a working model of the “sound cage” experiments used to explore auditory attention in American psychology laboratories in the 1890s. Check out Julian’s SoRA studio course on this stuff later this summer, Speculative Psychotechnics!

My inspiration?
I wear a bracelet sometimes that reads “WWALD” — which stands for “What Would Annea Lockwood Do?” The great composer/sound-artist would… listen.

IRL

A rundown of what’s up at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn

• Thu, May 21st: ATTENTION LAB: COALITION, an experiential, participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention with a focus on COALITION’s role in Attention Activism. Register HERE.

• Tue, May 26th: Our three-week online seminar, ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201, begins. Participants will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities. Register HERE.

• Sat, May 30th - Sun, May 31st: Join us for SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!: an all-night reading of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, as a celebration of one of the oldest human technologies, lyric poetry. Register HERE.

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!

When I was in fifth grade, Glenridge Elementary’s reigning cool kid, Gabe Remshardt, taught all the other boys in my year how to fold a $20 bill so that it appeared to depict the Twin Towers going up in smoke. We halved it lengthwise, then curled the corners upward at a 45º angle until the edges aligned: Suddenly, the innocuous shrubbery of the White House lawn became that morbid plume from the apocalyptic TV broadcasts that had imprinted on our young brains.

We huddled in the corner of the blacktop, passing around the two Jacksons in our possession and performing the magic reveal one by one. I recall suspecting, even at that age, that we were kidding ourselves — that the suggestion of some enormous conspiracy was nothing more than a bit of visual coincidence and some wishful thinking.

Picture us: gazing down at the cash in our hand, quietly awed by the suspicion that we were seeing past the veil of everyday life to the secret inner workings of the world. And we were, in a sense. It just wasn’t in the way we thought. The secret driver of the universe wasn’t some message hidden in the money; it was the money itself.

In this issue, we’re attending to money — and to the ways that money deflects, eludes, and transforms our attention. In Visions of Attention, Haena examines the kago cults of post-WWII Melanesia. In Stuff for Study, Czarina shares contemporary writing on the strange dynamics of money in the age of human fracking.

And in IRL, we issue a special invitation to our upcoming (Fri, May 8th) panel on AI, ATTENTION ACTIVISM, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE — featuring Capri LaRocca, Henry R Kramer, Julia Luz Betancourt, and Amirio Freeman. Join us!

Remuneratively yours,

Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

Cargo Thinking

Following World War II, visitors to the Melanesian islands in the South Pacific would have been greeted by airplanes and landing strips surrounded by processions of men in a militaristic parade — except the men were made from straw, bamboo, and wood. With the withdrawal of colonial and military bases at the end of the war, movements like the Tuka Movement in Fiji, Taro Cult in Papua New Guinea, and the John Frum (a mystical figure depicted as a U.S. military serviceman) Cult on Tanna supplicated for the arrival of goods-laden cargo planes through rituals that mimicked the appearance and movement of their former settlers.

First appearing in 1945, the term “cargo cult” as a catch-all for these various beliefs has since come under criticism for its implication of the desire for better life through the favors of Western powers. But Melanesian kago signified more than literal cargo and wealth. And neither were they seen as gifts from the European settlers — rather, charismatic prophets promised favor from ancestors or hybrid-Christian spirits which would bring about a new social order.

With time, more nuanced analyses began to highlight the abrupt transition from the indigenous system of exchange where one accrued social status through gifts to a system of exchange based on money. As anthropologists like Marcel Mauss have pointed out, gifts are tied to specific individuals and their continued exchange creates a complex, cumulative chain of moral obligation within the community. From such a relational perspective, the impersonal, quantified behaviors of money creates a moral vacuum. In addition to this, the quantities of manufactured goods suddenly rushing into the islands were simply unimaginable at the scale of native communities. These fashioned a new narrative to safely position the extraordinary influx of stuff in a cosmology already disrupted by Christian missionaries.

Modern business-lingo has adopted “cargo thinking” as a warning against wanting results without understanding the underlying process by which those results are produced. Still, the effigies created by the Melanasian devotees feel strangely relatable as attempts to invest some semblance of meaning into what is inherently an empty signifier.

— Haena Chu

Stuff for Study: Balancing the Books

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• The reality-distortion of the markets – Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou for Aeon

• Everyone is gambling and no one is happy – on Substack

• An economics lesson from Tolstoy – Nick Romeo for The New Yorker

• Time is money is work is virtue – Colette Shade for The Baffler

• The privatized internet has failed us – Paris Marx for Jacobin

• The bonds of catastrophe – D. Graham Burnett for Cabinet

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Fri, May 8th: Join us for an evening of discussion and practice at the nexus of Attention Activism and environmental justice in collaboration with Counterstream. Sign up HERE!

• Sat, May 9th: What you Attend to Grows: A Special Earth Month Attention Lab is an experiential free workshop exploring the relationship between attention and the natural world in Prospect Park. Sign up HERE!

• Thu, May 12th: ATTENTION LAB: SANCTUARY is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

I recently wrapped up another section of Attention Activism 101, our introductory course at the School of Radical Attention. For three weeks, we gathered at the National Academy of Design and discussed readings on the topics of the attention economy, the notion of ecologies of attention, and attention activism.

To begin the last class, we performed an attention practice inspired by Langston Hughes’s Freedom’s Plow, in which participants attended to their hands and the hands of a partner. As she scanned the practice instructions, a student remarked that she’d been thinking lately about the particular humanness of hands – these appendages of gesture and action.

Thinking about our hands seems particularly timely as we grapple with the increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence on the human endeavor of art. As artists and craftspeople protest for labor protections against AI use in their industries, they affirm a communal value: that making and doing are acts worth preserving. That, as my student suggested in her reflection, we extend our humanity into our shared world through the work of our hands.

In this issue, we attend to CRAFT. How does the act of making things direct attention to our humanity? What attentional magic emerges through pen and paper, or brush and canvas, or thread and fabric? In Visions of Attention, Eleanor surfaces the traditions of Balinese dance. In Practice in Practice, Richard and Marcela attend to the body as a temple and amusement park in a reading of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. And in Stuff for Study, I share writer Garth Greenwell’s reflections on the intertwined art and life of Ruth Asawa, plus a coder’s meditation on the waning days of craft.

Read on!

Manually yours,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

The Mask That Materializes

From the sacred Wali ceremonies to the solitary Topeng Pajegan and the ensemble Topeng Panca, Balinese dance spans a wide spectrum of ritual and entertainment. Yet one theme remains near-constant: the devotional creation of the mask, or in Balinese/Kawi, the tapel. Carved by hand (often from the sacred pule tree) and imbued through ceremony with spirit and intention, each mask becomes a vessel for the non-human being it represents.

The process of crafting a tapel is as much spiritual as it is technical. Artists, many of whom have been crafting these masks for decades, undergo purification rituals and periods of meditation, aligning their own attention with the character they intend to invite into form. The mask is not a prop but an active participant, a channel through which archetypes move and speak. It is not uncommon for dancers to sleep with the mask by their bedside to deepen their understanding of its essence.

Above, behold Topeng Tua: the Old Man. With his deeply lined face and the slow, considered movement he summons, he embodies memory, wisdom, and the inevitability of aging. To dance Topeng Tua is to enter a different rhythm of time in which practices of reflection, humility, and reverence materialized in the mask shape every moment and guide every movement.

Here, attention is bodied forth in ways that transcend the usual delineations between senses. The dancer listens with more than ears, feels with more than skin – the mask trains the body to perceive in new dimensions, to become both vessel and witness. From the creation of the tapel to the performance itself, attention is a sacred medium, a bridge between intelligences that flow in ways both seen and unseen.

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Practice in Practice

Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism

The Body Delighted

Perhaps no contemporary writer embodied reckless commitment to gustatory pleasure as fully as Anthony Bourdain. He was an attention activist without knowing it. His writings on taste offer a starkly different ethos than the attention economy’s “foodie” culture. Where Bourdain calls on us to slurp oysters that taste of seawater, TikTok and Instagram offer images of food so perfectly lit we’ve forgotten it’s supposed to end up in your mouth(and maybe on your face, too). How has technology changed our experience of food? And how can we eat with our full attention, in the messy, joyful way Bourdain describes?

On a brisk and bright day in late March a group of strangers gathered at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn to explore these questions. We met up by the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument and started out with a physical warmup which caught the attention of a woman arriving for a Tai Chi session nearby. She joined our group as we began to read an excerpt from Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Then we gave people an attention practice inspired by the text: spend twenty minutes attending to the farmer’s first as if your body were a temple, then as if it were an amusement park. Richard, in amusement park mode, bought some oysters and focaccia bread to share. Folks departed, wandered the market, tested both modes of attention (to their body, to the possibilities of the wares), and, in some cases, gave into temptation.

Upon regrouping on a sunny bench to debrief, we shucked a few oysters to open the conversation. We discussed our experience of the practice and gave each participant an opportunity to share stories of how food had impacted their lives. Richard described a dinner he’d had in Italy where everyone ate pasta with their faces at a shared table. No dishes, no silverware, no manners — only deliciousness! A woman recounted watching her father, a strict vegan for decades, eat a slice of pizza for the first time as dementia slowly loosened his dietary preferences. Another friend remembered his grandmother’s cookbook, the last trace of her he had left.

It was lovely to spend a morning with this group learning about each other and engaging our bodily and attentional senses for the plain pleasure of being alive. We left re-committed to building a movement against coercive tech, not from anger, but from delight. Gathering in the park with others, breaking bread and sharing stories: no online experience can replicate this. There’s no innovation needed; to optimize it would ruin it.

Eat. Outside. With People. Fantastic! As is.

Let’s not forget.

— Marcela Mulholland & Richard Dent IV

Stuff for Study: Labors of Love

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• AI’s AURA: Aesthetic, Ubiquitous, Regimented Automation — Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski for e-flux

• Choosing to walk: on AI writing tools and labour — for internet princess on Substack

• On the nonlinearity of looms — Kathleen Quaintance for The Empty Cup

• How small a thought: On Ruth Asawa and relating art and life — for To a Green Thought on Substack

• A coder considers the waning days of craft — James Somers for the New Yorker

• Centering: a spiritual resource in times of conflict — M.C. Richards for the Sun Magazine

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Thu, April 23th: Join us in a free workshop inspired by Simone Weil for our residency at the National Academy of Design. Sign up HERE!

• Thu, April 23th: Join our IRL seminar FRACKING OIL, FRACKING MINDS led by writer and organizer Peter Schmidt. We will study the material and metaphorical relationships between attention activism and environmental politics. Enroll HERE!

• Sat, April 25th: What you Attend to Grows: A Special Earth Month Attention Lab is an experiential free workshop exploring the relationship between attention and the natural world. Sign up HERE.

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!

Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd, is a linguist and content creator researching the social origins of viral internet language. He recently wrote a book called Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language and publishes essays on Substack about emerging internet culture. He recently sat down with our managing editor, Czarina Ramos, to talk about the internet as a site of study.

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CR: Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Adam. When I told some of my colleagues about this conversation, I accidentally called you an entomologist. But you don’t, in fact, study bugs.

AA: And you need an etymologist to tell you the difference; entomos is the root for segmented, as bugs are, and etymos means truth, so etymology is the study of truth.

CR: You’re a linguist who studies words on the Internet. Can you forecast viral words?

AA: Definitely. It’s kind of like forecasting the weather or politics, where you’re going to be wrong some percentage of the time. And it’s reductive to say, I have this formula for a word that’s going to go viral, but yeah, if a word fits a social need, and people didn’t have language to describe this phenomenon before, that usually means it is going to get popular. There’s a minimal distinctiveness; it needs to sound close to similar words that work right, but also be different enough. It needs to be adaptable to new situations. It shouldn’t stick out; obtrusiveness, which is how much a word registers as a joke, is something people tend to avoid in common usage. We’ll adopt it briefly as a meme, but then it’ll die out with the lifespan of the meme.

CR: Have you been delightfully surprised about a word that unexpectedly became popular recently?

AA: I really like the word vagueposting. We needed the word. There’s lots of different types of engagement bait: clickbait, rage bait, but we didn’t have a word for vagueposting, which means intentionally sounding obscure online so that people will comment and make you go more viral. That’s the algorithmic bias at work.

CR: The black box of the algorithm spits out a “For You” page and thereby directs what you pay attention to. How do you confront this as a researcher?

AA: One of the first things we should ask ourselves when we look at a video is, “Why am I seeing this video?” And there’s always a reason. If I see a video go viral, even if I’m not in research mode, I usually ask myself, why did this video get recommended? It’s generating a lot of comments because it’s vagueposting. Or it uses this kind of hook that psychologically works really well. You can see patterns.

I’m interested in what videos aren’t showing up. What does show up is filtered through a highly selective bottleneck that then affects what we ultimately see. So I ask myself: Why am I seeing this? Is there a bias to what’s being recommended that helps me visualize the known unknowns?

CR: Have you tried to click yourself out of the algorithmic bias? Can you remove yourself from a “For You” page, which is, obviously, for you?

AA: I don’t think you can ever remove the observer. Language is a little like physics. Linguistics is slowly catching up to this fact: that the observer does affect the system. So if you publicly talk about a word, you’re going to change a word. If you’re looking at a word, you’re looking at it through your lens and that’s going to affect what you think the word is. I don’t think you can really remove it, but we can take steps to create a feeling of defamiliarization within ourselves, to get closer at objectivity — then again, I don’t know. I question how much we should try to be objective with language.

CR: Say more.

AA: We should just recognize that words elicit feelings in us. The “For You” page, because you think it is for you, creates a certain phenomenological feeling of: This is right. This is as it should be. You have to understand that people resonate with certain ideas more because they think those ideas are for them, and you cannot separate that. Observing the word in situ gives you a better view of how other people are understanding it.

CR: You recently took part in a discussion with other young tech activists and thinkers on the question, “Should We Get Off?” and whether we should all be leaving our smart devices and social media platforms entirely. As a scholar, educator, and general user of the internet, you use the internet as a site of fascination and study. You’ve also written about the social consequences of things like Polymarket and clip farming, which can harm our social fabric. Is there a tension between fascination and doom? Why stay online?

AA: It’s hard to avoid that feeling like the internet is getting worse, and it probably is, unless we do something about it — and I really think we should do something about it. There’s a lot of questions stacked in a trench coat there.

So, should we get off? I tend to argue that we should be on our phones to some degree. I come across as disagreeing with the Luddites; they are really cool human beings who think in an interesting way. But also, I’m studying how ideas travel, and you can think of them like a virus. They start with a higher node, like in an epidemiological network, and then they move to people lower down in the network. And social media literally recreated that network. So even if you are offline, the music you’re listening to at a bar and the clothes your friends are wearing, everything is going to trickle down from the algorithm anyway, and that’s going to influence you and your reality. It’s like that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly talks about cerulean blue. You might be listening to a certain kind of music because it was planted there, and someone’s trying to engineer a reality. I’m not so concerned about music tastes, but there are political ideas that are moving dangerously. We should be aware of this, we should be taking steps to make the internet a better place.

For all I’ve griped about the internet, I also find a lot of beauty in it. It’s a place where people can go to connect. I’ve been following this architecture series that I love, and I’m a fan of this conveyor belt page on Instagram. There are so many of these beautiful corners of the internet, and I think the more place-like they feel, the better. Like old websites back in the day, or servers where you gather with your friends. We should fight to preserve an internet which makes us feel like we are connected, and we’re happy with each other, and we’re exposed to new sources of knowledge.

I write about how platforms can shape our thought processes because I think it’s possible, if we get our act together, to do something about it. We should, at the very least, be aware of what’s going on, so that our offline, which is going to increasingly be shaped by the online, doesn’t get shaped in a way that surprises us.

CR: Rather than being shaped by what we consume online, can we show up to online spaces more like our offline selves? Would that make the internet more sincere?

AA: I think a normal human thing is acting differently depending on the context, and that’s actually fine. You should act differently in your grandmother’s house versus when you’re talking to a close friend. There’s an expectation of what it means to be online that shapes how we behave. There’s a unique attention that’s elicited for engagement retention.

In the influencer economy, people use the word authenticity like it’s a buzzword. You want to be more authentic if you’re trying to go viral, and so the way the word authenticity is being used is less about being true and more about the appearance of being true. So you want to look like you’re sincereposting, even if really you’re not, you’re modifying things. I think we should be more aware that nobody’s quite sincere online or even in person, but we should understand when it’s a product of actual human interaction versus when it’s a product of the platform structuring our reality for us.

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CR: Do you have a positive stance on the ways that the internet shapes our interactions? I grew up in a corner of Tumblr in which fandom culture created places where you could express unabashed love for TV shows or musicians. Can the Internet still be a place for community?

AA: Subcultures are amazing. Another innate human tendency is that we like to put ourselves in groups, and this can be harnessed in a wonderfully positive direction, like how fandom communities provide an outlet for people, and are a means of figuring out their identity. I really like this conveyor belt memes page because there’s a community always commenting, and at this point, people will randomly send me conveyor belts. I’m on discord servers where I feel like there are actual people just sharing their lives. I think it’s hard to be on the internet without finding one of those beautiful niches.

So I do think this characteristic of the internet can be harnessed in a positive direction, but it starts with affordances, which is the psychological term for something that makes it easier to do something else. And we have platforms designing their affordances for negativity to spread by targeting high arousal, engagement, emotions. Humans follow structures in an almost annoying way — I think a lot about this. At the School of Radical Attention, I did a Sidewalk Study on Hannah Arendt. I think a lot about her concept of the “banality of evil,” and I think a lot of people aren’t really bad. We do things because of the social structure set up for us, and we tend not to think too deeply about it. And if you make a pro-social structure, you can lead people toward doing something good rather than doing something evil. That’s a future that I hope we can have on the Internet.

CR: One of the things that we constantly return to at the School of Radical Attention is the role of study. As someone who is studying the Internet, and trying to educate on the power of the platforms, how do you see your role in making a better, more pro-social Internet?

AA: I see it as a moral duty to educate yourself on where things come from, how things ended up the way they are. Going back to the etymology of etymology, words can reveal truths about who we are as humans and who our society is. Why are so many of our words coming from African American English and incel culture? It tells something about who is popular and who is subversively harnessing humor to influence the internet. Why is it that platforms really do seem to be mediating our interactions? If you follow where words come from, you can’t help but reach this insight and see that these technologies really are structuring our reality. That seems like something we should pay attention to.

There’s a lot of misinformation online. To identify the problem, to know what to react against, you need to start by asking, Where did this come from? How does this happen? The way we use language is conditioned by sociology and these other disciplines, so when you look at language, you begin to see the relatedness of everything.

CR: Can linguistics humanize social media and its users?

AA: I think the tendency to write memes off as “brainrot” is counter-productive for inspecting our reality. The digital world is treated as this separate place where stupid things happen, and we just need to go “touch grass.” But we’re not characters in Severance — this is still a part of our real life and affects who we are. If we start by recognizing that our humanity extends online, that opens the door to asking more serious questions about how to improve the internet and our culture as a whole.

Have you ever played the game GeoGuessr? The idea is that you’re dropped into Google Street View somewhere in the world, and you have to pinpoint your corresponding location on a map. While some (myself included) perform strongly only with the help of extremely obvious clues (Oh, well there’s the Eiffel Tower), others can glance at a patch of dirt in black and white and, with certainty, state, “Looks like your standard New Zealand.”

GeoGuessing is a delightful practice of attention to place. As one advances in the level of difficulty, the easy hints begin to disappear. Every mundane detail is a focal point: I am considering the painted lines on the road, and I am attempting to glean information from the sign of a hair salon. The minutiae become features of the geography, informing me of place much like the identification of a native species might.

I at first was attracted to the idea that GeoGuessing might provide me with a wanderlust fix, or at the very least point me to potential future destinations. Instead, the game presents an alternative mode of travel. Unlike most vacations in which an itinerary is formed around what we already know to be significant, GeoGuessing presents a reversal: with no prior information, we arrive, we look around, and we ask, “What makes this place what it is?”

This issue of The Empty Cup is about geographies. How do places orient our attention? How does attention transform when we shift the scope of our geography? In Visions of Attention, Eleanor considers the significance of viewing the Earth from outer space. In Practice in Practice, kyle thinks about what characteristics of a place we consider interesting. And in Stuff for Study, I share stories on black hole mapping and the entanglements of cartography and citizenship.

Read on!

Spatially yours,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

Awakening from Outer Space

Few images have shifted the frame of human perspective as profoundly as Earthrise. Taken by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, this photograph captures Earth not as a backdrop to the human drama, but as a self-contained, fragile presence floating in the vast, mysterious cosmos.

While other images of Earth had circulated prior to Anders’ photograph, none had been seen through human eyes from space; here was one of our own, blasted into the great unknown, rebroadcasting our home back to us from far beyond its edges. For the first time, the planet was witnessed not simply as “ours,” but as a being in its own right – delicate, finite, and whole.

This sudden confrontation with the foundational-yet-previously-unveiled mirrored the seismic shifts in social consciousness of the era. The late 1960s – marked by political upheaval, cultural revolution, and an increasingly mainstream social/ecological awareness – saw Earthrise emerge as an emblem of an “awakening” humankind. Framed by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, it fueled the environmental movement that, less than 18 months later, led to the first Earth Day in 1970.

Attention and meaning are deeply entangled, part of the reciprocal dynamics that illuminate our singular (and shared) existence. Earthrise symbolized a tectonic shift of what it is to be human for an entire generation. Widening the scope of our vision meant renegotiating our place as one species among many, interwoven with the rhythms of this earthly abode, with one another, and with the many expressions of life’s unfolding across time and space.

—

Practice in Practice

Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism

To Behold the Manhole

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with manhole covers. It started with a deep dive into internet infrastructure for an essay — fiber optic cables, data centers, the hidden nervous system of the city. But now I can’t stop stopping in the street. These overlooked artifacts of urban infrastructure have become, for me, the definition of interesting. Which is such an interesting word, isn’t it? Interesting.

In her 2012 work of cultural theory, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, scholar Sianne Ngai attempts to excavate what we really mean when we reach for that word – and why we reach for it so relentlessly. It’s a kind of attention activism, her project: turning our gaze toward that which directs our gaze. Because interesting, for Ngai, signals that something is worth attending to. But it stops short of telling us why. It forestalls the deeper aesthetic judgment – is it interesting because it’s terrible? Sublime? Merely strange? – and instead makes a demand of us. It asks us to justify ourselves, to follow the thread, to keep looking.

So why is a manhole cover “interesting”? Perhaps, because it speaks in an esoteric language to a hidden layer of the city, right beneath our feet. Because it holds a little-told history of how our city breathes and circulates and holds itself together. Because it is a vehicle for studying how we live – together, in public, in passing.

Which is exactly what we did on March 22nd in a Sidewalk Study in the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side has its strange convergences: trust fund kids and vintage stores priced for the one percent, the whole performance of a neighborhood that has been many things to many people. But it also has manhole covers, and graffiti, and overturned tree stumps, and people from every walk of life moving through the same block without knowing each other’s names. What our study kept returning to was this: for us, the interesting things about the Lower East Side – the genuinely interesting things – are its more mundane textures. The parts that don’t make it into the branding. So for all the attention and capital flowing toward the scenes that converge here, perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is what’s left when you stop looking at the spectacle — the small, unglamorous infrastructure of a place: the bolts and drains and root-buckled sidewalks that hold everything up, quietly, without asking to be noticed. The city’s hidden grammar. The layer that was always there, waiting for you to stop and attend.

— kyle barnes

Stuff for Study: Schools of Thought

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• Cartographies of consciousness: mapping relational worlds — Queenie Wu for The Empty Cup

• Charting the edges of the known world — Surekha Davies for Aeon

• Map-making is in the hands of Big Tech; so is your citizenship — Hasi Jain for The Swaddle

• Journey from “the center of the world” — Zoé Samudzi for The Funambulist

• Experimental geography: radical approaches to landscape, cartography, and urbanism — Nato Thompson

• Radical Cartography — an archival project by Bill Rankin

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Wed, April 8th: Join us for our IRL seminar DOCUMENTING THE DISAPPEARED, where we will discuss what it means to give our attention to someone or something we are told not to see. Enroll HERE!

• Thu, April 9th: Join us for the opening reception of IDEA, SCORE, PROCESS, OBJECT in our Sanctuary Gallery. RSVP HERE!

• Tue, March 31st - Sat, April 25th: We are in residency at the National Academy of Design‘s FUTURE SCHOOLS exhibition in Chelsea. For this full month, we will organize practices of attention inspired by a pantheon of pedagogical thinkers and special events such as panel talks on the agenda of art and attention. Find the full schedule and RSVP HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!

When we founded the School of Radical Attention in June of 2023, we knew that its name was something of a provocation. What on earth is a “School of Radical Attention,” after all? Over the past three years, our coalition of Attention Activists has sought to answer that question, and to body forth the resulting vision into the world: we are a community of teachers and learners dedicated to studying the emancipatory and worldbuilding powers of human attention.

But there is a second way of interpreting our name. According to this second reading, attention is not what is studied at the school; it is the school itself. Attention, in other words, is the mind- and soul-space in which we encounter the world and each other. All of the ways we learn and grow as humans take place within the bounds of our own attention, the umwelt of a free mind.

This alternative view anchors the title of SoRA’s upcoming residency at the National Academy of Design: ATTENTION IS A SCHOOL. Over the course of four weeks in March and April, we’ll be imagining the future of school at the Academy’s gallery space in Chelsea (right beside The High Line). If you’re in New York, we hope you will join us at our gallery opening party on Tuesday, March 31st from 6 to 8pm. REGISTER HERE.

To learn more about our upcoming month of utopian pedagogy, visit our Art Programs page. And to think through the possibilities of “the school”... read on!

Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

This is Your Brain on Your Brain

In 1978, researchers at EMI Laboratories captured the first magnetic resonance images of a human brain. These black-and-white snapshots revealed the brain’s intricate architecture by mapping hydrogen atoms in the body’s water through their behavior in a magnetic field – the first time humanity had ever seen itself at the scale of the atom. It was a monumental achievement that advanced the relatively new field of neuroscience. It was also a strange and unprecedented encounter: the brain was seeing itself function. Using the invisible, relational force of the magnetic field as its backdrop, the MRI produced something like a map of human thought, a static snapshot that stood to change the medical field forever.

The MRI measured and made legible the biological correlates of our psychological beingness while providing invaluable insights and life-saving care. In doing so, it brought into direct conversation two ways of thinking about the human brain: the mechanical and the irreducible. Just as a map of the atom cannot account for the unquantifiable characteristics of aliveness – our emotions, our sense of the sacred, the indefinable qualities of the heart, the MRI was never intended to examine more than our neural activity. Yet there it is, happening onscreen: the pulsing colors of a mind in motion. The MRI is an example of how our attempts to quantify human experience always gesture beyond their own technical limitations. What’s possible when we examine these maps with an eye to the mechanistic and the transcendent views of human existence? How might we come to see these two accounts not in contradiction but as mutually constitutive stories of what it means to be us?

—

Stuff for Study: Schools of Thought

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• Can we find freedom in education? — James Brooke-Smith for Aeon

• The historical context of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Bernardo Bianchi for Jacobin

• My life as an academic article — Marci Kwon for Parapraxis

• Democratic education is never pure — Joel Suarez for n+1

• Personal curriculums: the good, the bad and the ugly of self-study trends — on Substack

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Tue, March 31th: The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design. Join us for our gallery opening party from 6-8 PM at the National Academy’s headquarters in Chelsea. RSVP HERE.

• Wed, April 1st: Join us for our IRL seminar DOCUMENTING THE DISAPPEARED, where we will consider what it means to give our attention to someone or something we are told not to see. Enroll HERE.

• Thu, April 2nd: ATTENTION LAB: STUDY is an experiential, participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention with a focus on STUDY’s role in Attention Activism. Sign up HERE.

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!

PS: You’ve done lots of work about the relationship between technology and life in the workplace, and about the ways our agency is shaped by that relationship. Do you think anything is different about our current moment?

ASP: Things are different: they’ve gotten worse. (Welcome to 2026.) Silicon Valley has had 20 years to refine the variety of tools that it uses to make every second of our time on screens into a knife fight in a phone booth for our attention — usually in order to sell us another subscription, or something equally noble.

But on the positive side, I think the recognition that these tools are constantly in use and that they can and need to be resisted is also far greater, right? I see this in my own kids, who grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley. They had their first smartphones when they were younger than they should have been, yet today they’re deeply cynical about these devices and the motives of the tech companies. They recognize that you’re not just interacting with a cool device, or a character on a screen. You’re allowing a company that is responding to the demands of venture capital to come into your life. I think that young people are consequently more thoughtful about how they use these technologies. That’s a positive development.

More broadly, we now see young people express concern around attention and artificial intelligence, and ask really interesting and pressing questions around our interactions: from the ways in which we interact with and think about AI to concerns about the ways that AI could be used to further advance the agenda of selling us another subscription box. We also recognize the potential for this technology to adapt strategies of attention fracking so that those strategies become far more granular, responsive, and intrusive. I’m co-editing an issue of the Journal of Contemplative Studies that’s about technology and attention. Several of the pieces, interestingly, are about AI, which is not what I expected when we first put out the call for papers. But it makes perfect sense.

PS: I was going to ask about that project. Why “contemplative traditions” right now? What kind of questions do you think we need to be asking about those traditions?

ASP: The answer to the first part of the question is: Contemplative traditions always! These are practices that smart, thoughtful people have looked to for a couple thousand years when they’ve sought guidance for living better.

The second answer is that they are an obvious and accessible reaction to all of the challenges that we talk about in our work. At the micro level, there is, in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a really interesting twinned history of contemplative practices and the history of information technologies. This part of the world is really important in the history of 20th century global Buddhism. There are a number of Buddhist temples and retreats here that have coexisted and sometimes had overlapping memberships with early computer pioneers. The Homebrew Computer Club, and early folks at Apple went on the same silent retreats, were influenced by the same spiritual authors, etc. It’s not a huge surprise that there would be some kind of conversation between them.

PS: You’re framing contemplative traditions as a place where we can find answers to some questions that have been made more acute by technology. Let’s flip that. Do you think new technologies offer us any answers to questions posed by contemplative traditions?

ASP: I think… No. These things are tools and environments, but are they answers? I would have to spend more time with that question to come to an affirmative. There’s a long history of thinking about technologies as more than just stuff. And it may be that in one of those more elaborate ways of imagining technology, you could get to a different answer. But my initial thought is that these things aren’t answers, these things are tools, and it is smartest to treat them as such.

PS: It is interesting to say that technology can’t answer these deep questions when so often they are presented as answer-providing technologies. I’d guess that 99% of the world’s population who uses AI in any capacity are simply asking it questions.

AP: Your example uses “answers” in the narrow sense of retrieving information. Yeah, our technologies do serve that purpose. I was thinking of “answers” in the broader sense, that takes the form not of information but of ways to think about — and engage — with the world and your own self. These tools provide the specific answers, but not the larger, philosophical ones.

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PS: Can you give me a little more on the difference between those kinds of answers?

ASP: Sure. The answers to the question, what is the meaning of life? Or: how do I respond to this existential challenge? Etc... These are all things that in their very framing involve action, right? They are actions that tell us something about who we ought to be.

The question, “I have a tomato, a pear, and a chicken breast in my refrigerator, so what can I make for dinner?” is one that a GAI can answer, and involves action, but you’re probably not going to finish the meal being a profoundly different person.

The distinction that I would draw is between, first of all, answers that provide information versus answers that are guides to action. And secondly, the distinction between actions that involve changing oneself consciously versus quotidian things like preparing a meal.

PS: It seems like the more profound category of answers get down to the question of being — of who we are and what we are as people.

ASP: Absolutely. In my books there’s almost always one or two moments that are really critical for formulating the project and shaping my thinking about the book. And in The Distraction Addiction, one of those moments came when I was interviewing a Buddhist monk. He was originally from Denmark, and had trained as a physician and worked in big data stuff, and then… gave it all up, moved to Sri Lanka, and became a monk.

I asked him and some other monastics who had followed similar kinds of paths about their use of technology: Do you find it distracting to have a YouTube channel, or to have a blog? And it actually took a while to get clarity on the question, because at first it was like I was asking, How is it that you can put on clothes in a gravitational field? I was assuming that the source of the distractions was technology. They were coming at it with the assumption that the source of distraction is internal. And that our engagements with technology are merely an expression of the struggle that we all have to overcome what some Buddhists call “the monkey mind”, and to focus our minds and our lives around those things that truly matter. We were talking on two sides of a divide. It was really eye-opening for me.

This is something that is always in the background of my thinking about technology and attention and distraction: that for all of the incredible power and effort that Silicon Valley has invested in A-B testing every single pixel and second of our relationships with social media, YouTube, etc., or for all of the value that comes from working collectively to push back against what these technologies do and the underlying presumptions that they have — ultimately, dealing with the challenge of distraction involves as much looking inward as well as outward. It certainly helps to take that step in the company of others, to be savvy about how the tech industry aims to farm our attention, and how we can change the defaults and settings on our devices to help us focus a little more, but we’ll be most successful at using technologies more mindfully when we recognize that our minds are as great at generating distraction from within as they are at finding it out in the world.

PS: At the School, we encourage people to think about distraction not as the opposite of attention, but as a particular kind of attention that has plenty to teach us. What do you think distraction has to teach us?

ASP: First off, you’re exactly right that distraction isn’t really the absence of attention. It is something that is more purposeful. There are times when we don’t need to be focused on any particular thing. We can simply let our minds wander, and that’s perfectly safe, and it’s okay, and it’s something our minds like to do that has all kinds of benefits. I think that distraction is not the absence of attention, it is a redirection of it.

If I were to pitch a book called The Upside of Distraction, the first thing I would say is: Well, it’s proof that humans are really curious, and the world is a really interesting place. And it’s a signal that we need to learn how to interpret.

I would try to construct an argument around it somewhat the same way that people construct arguments around Attention Deficit. That this isn’t really about an inability to focus, it is a reluctance to focus on what the teacher is telling you to focus on.

PS: You’ve done a lot of writing and thinking about these questions in proximity to the business world and to Silicon Valley itself. SoRA and the Friends of Attention are expressly interested in the applications of attention beyond the productivity metrics of “time-on-task.” There’s not a ton of crossover between us and the private sector. How do you think the business world and the conversations happening there can deepen and enrich our work as attention activists?

ASP: There is a strain of people in business who are really quite deeply concerned with the question of How do you live well? Through these businesses that we build, these careers that we lead, how do we do our work in ways that make us better people, and make the place that we’re living in a better one? They’re not interested in it mainly in order to boost their annual revenues. They’re sincere about these questions as things worth pursuing on their own. The business people who write about this stuff are writing for people who are accustomed to solving problems and getting answers that they can use in their daily lives.

This kind of thinking possesses its own kind of earnestness that deserves to be taken seriously. It could teach us to speak to audiences in ways that will help them change for the better.

I’d wager that if you got a group of five random twenty-something New Yorkers recounting their 2020 COVID lockdown experience, you’d probably hear the word sourdough mentioned at least once. Confined to the limits of our living spaces, many of us found solace in the metabolic life of yeast and bacteria, watching our sourdough starters rise and fall across the hours before beginning the days-long process of baking a loaf.

Admittedly, my interest in sourdough fizzled once the city opened back up. My social calendar didn’t have much room for sitting by the oven; feeding the starter became more inconvenience than ritual. As post-pandemic life quickened its pace, the days-long act of breadmaking began to seem simply out of scale.

My abandoned kitchen tools are now mostly a reminder that a relationship to food is, in some ways, a relationship to time. Our return to the timescale of business as usual is evident in the explosion of venture-backed fast casual bowls, streamlined to perfection in their preparation (by both human and robot) and agreeable enough to be shoveled quickly and mindlessly into our mouths while we populate spreadsheets. I hate to ring the alarm, but even the famously pro full service French are opting for lunch to go these days.

In his book How to Eat, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “The way we drink our tea can transform our lives if we truly devote our attention to it.” Food is, after all, an opportunity for ritual built into the cycles of our physical bodies. Yet daily hours optimized for convenience and productivity can turn mealtimes into afterthoughts. How can food nourish us when we turn our attention back to eating?

In this issue, we’re attending to food. In Visions of Attention, Eleanor follows the tomato through time and space. In Stuff for Study, I share a chronicle of the foodie. And in IRL, sample our school’s offerings by joining us for an ATTENTION LAB on building attention sanctuaries.

Culinarily yours,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Visions of Attention

An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention

Tomato, Xitomatl

Today’s more than 10,000 tomato varieties can be traced back to the single Solanum lycopersicum, which was first found growing wild in the Andes roughly 80,000 years ago. The tomato’s millenia-long journey up the coast – through modern-day Ecuador, northern Chile, and the Galápagos – remains a mystery. The fruit’s first recorded name, however, is known to us: xitomatl, given by the Nahua people, among its most enthusiastic early cultivators.

In 1521, after the Spanish invasion destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the tomato was pulled into the crosscurrents of colonial conquest/subjugation, eventually landing in the Caribbean and Europe. To the people of Europe, its arrival sparked curiosity, then concern: only the wealthy could afford this transplanted delicacy, and had the awkward side effect of making them ill. For over a century, the tomato fell into its new continental category of “poison” until an explanation emerged: the wealthy’s delicate dishware — pewter plates rich in lead — were secreting the toxic metal in the presence of the tomato’s vibrant acidity. Another theory, perhaps less engrossing, traced the tomatoes’ resemblance to the poisonous belladonna plant.

Today, the tomato is everywhere – central to countless cuisines, chopped, sauced, and sung over. It has voyaged across physical and psychological landscapes, been shaped and relocated by oppressive forces, and subjected to scientific and societal imagination and (re)interpretation. And yet, as with many trajectories measured by particular strains of modernity, the tomato remains framed in terms of its human uses. What might the tomato say of its passage through time and space, if we were to change what guides our gaze?

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Stuff for Study: Tastemaking

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• A brief history of spectacular dining — Fanny Singer for Frieze

• Seeing the city by way of the grocery aisles — Richard Morgan for New York Magazine

• The life and death of the American foodie — Jaya Saxena for Eater

• Why are we seeing viral recipes on our commute? — Willa Glickman for Hell Gate

• Corn tastes better on the honor system — Robin Wall Kimmerer for Emergence Magazine

• Food past, food futures: the culinary history of COVID-19 — The Global Historiography Collective for Public Domain Review

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Thu, March 12th: Join us for our IRL seminar COMPLEXITY, where we’ll explore how complex systems—neither chaotic nor ordered—shape our attention and reveal new ways to navigate an ever-shifting world. Enroll HERE.

• Sat, March 14th in Austin, TX: Join D. Graham Burnett and Alyssa Loh of the Friends of Attention for an evening celebrating our new book, ATTENSITY! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement at SXSW. In this intimate event, Graham and Alyssa will read from Attensity!, discuss the practice of attention activism, and take questions from the audience. RSVP HERE.

• Mon, March 16th: ATTENTION LAB: SANCTUARY is an experiential, participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention with a focus on sanctuary’’s role in Attention Activism. Sign up HERE.

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!