Some icebreaker questions are better than others. “Would you rather be in a deep sea submarine, or in outer space?” is a personal favorite, as it’s a quick way to gauge a stranger’s appetite for the immensity of the unknown universe.

While space travel might be a traditional symbol of our pioneering spirit, I tend to campaign for the submarine voyage as the more foreign option. Scientists have mapped the topography and modeled the conditions for marine life, yet photographs have only been able to capture a fraction of the deepest ocean floors and a handful of its inhabitants. And with fewer depictions of deep sea voyage in pop culture, it seems harder to imagine ourselves in a submersible to the same degree as we envision suiting up as astronauts and boarding a spacecraft.

I don’t think you could go wrong either way; what I appreciate about the question is that both options lead one to conditions inhospitable to humans. If only from a brief glimpse, we can envision what transpires in worlds other than our own and give the human experience a backseat view — at least, to the best of our efforts. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the scientist Dr. Snaut laments humankind’s inability to see beyond ourselves. “We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don’t know what to do with other worlds.”

For this issue, we are attending to what is Beyond Our Reach. In Visions of Attention, Haena considers desire and withholding in the work of the ancient painter Parrhasius. In Practice in Practice, kyle attends to the familiar yet foreign world of plants. In Stuff for Study, I share writing on the imperceptible: ghosts, vibes, and heaven.

Read on!

Yours in the great beyond,

Czarina Ramos
Managing Editor

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Visions of Attention

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

Veiled Meaning

According to Pliny’s chronicle Naturalis Historia, the ancient Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius were so skillful at rendering reality that one day they decided to test their abilities with a contest. Zeuxis painted an image of grapes so lifelike that hungry birds flew into it — an impressive feat of realism. Parrhasius countered with a painting obscured by a veil. Only when onlookers approached to uncover the image within did they realize the veil itself was painted.

If some see Parrhasius as the clear victor, is it simply because he managed to persuade human beings instead of birds? Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used this parable to point out a supposedly unique characteristic of human attention: the desire to uncover the hidden. This desire is what prompted onlookers to “buy into” Parrhasius’ visual trick. The act of uncovering the illusion itself was the source of their fascination. What does this tell us about our attention — and about the peculiar power exerted upon us by the unknown?

— Haena Chu

Practice in Practice

Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism

Plantsight

Somewhere in industrial Greenpoint, between the onion-domes of a wastewater treatment plant and the polluted waters of a superfund site, I am crouched, peering intently at a wildflower. Here is Kingsland Wildflowers, a rooftop garden and the venue for the latest Consumption Book Club, a literary + culinary event series I run with my friend Colette. I’m not the only one flower-gazing; some thirty humans are paused in contemplation throughout the meandering meadow of native paths, attending to the bright petals scattered throughout. Scattered about the grass, we humans seem part of the garden ourselves.

Inspired by our latest book selection, The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger, Colette and I prompted participants to freewrite from a place of childlike wonder toward the mysterious world of plants. I’m dutifully tuning out my industrial surrounds and giving my full attention to a Brown-eyed Susan.

But attention is not the same as access. Equipped with Schlanger’s reporting on plant senses and plant behavior, I can no longer see just a yellow flower with a dark center. To the bees working visiting this oasis among concrete behemoths, the petals fluoresce into a bullseye, a landing strip in ultraviolet. It’s a color I have for which I have no receptor (or word, either).

Which is to say the flower is not addressed to me. What I’m calling beautiful is a message co-evolved over millions of years for somebody else, and I am reading it over their shoulder. I crouch lower. I keep looking. The gap doesn’t close, and that turns out to be the point: my attention gets sharpest right where it fails.

This is what a good book can do: redirect the eye, then show the eye the edges of its vision. The Light Eaters was, for me, an invitation to attend more closely to plants by imagining the multifaceted worlds they make. Consumption Book Club takes that invitation literally; we ingest what we read, translating text into recipes so ideas arrive by mouth as well as by page. Here, we translated it into a meadow. Thirty people on a rooftop, crouched at the edge of a perception not our own, attending to the enchanting livelihoods of wildflowers.

— kyle barnes
SoRA Faculty

Stuff for Study: Out of Sight, In Mind

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• With regards to the invisible — A. Kendra Greene for Nautilus

• What are we writing about when we write about ghosts? — Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson for Reactor

• How heaven became a place among the stars — Stephen Case for Aeon

• Vibe, mood, energy, or bust-time re-enchantment — Mitch Therieau for The Drift

• Metaphors can make you blind — Iain McGilchrist on Substack

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Thu, August 27: ATTENTION LAB: STUDY is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

DGB: Marcela, I heard you give a really interesting talk this past summer at the University of Navarra, as part of the big conference on “ATTENTION AND FLOURISHING.” I went to your session because I saw the title (“St Augustine on Attention and the Redemptive Now: Inhabiting Time in an Age of Distraction”), and got excited to see what you would have to say on a topic that I really care about. Then, to my great delight, you actually launched your presentation with a quote from Attensity! The part where we invoke just how radically different Augustine’s ideas about attention are from our track-and-trigger world of the attention economy. Here is what we say, and thus the point from which you began your presentation:

…humans are effectively incapable of pure, true, focused attention because they exist in time. Forever splayed out across memories of the past, anticipations of the future, and the vicissitudes of each passing moment, humans can never genuinely gather themselves into the conditions of sensory and cognitive unity that would be a state of authentic “attention.” (…) The implication? The pursuit of moments of the best kind of attention humans can achieve — moments of authentic contemplation — was understood by Augustine … as nothing less than redemptive. The pursuit of attention was an effort to return to God, from whom we had come.

In the paper that followed, you really went deep on this idea! I learned so much from you, and am keen to get our readers thinking about this stuff. Could you start by telling us how you got interested in this topic?

MDR: Thank you, Graham! I’ve been following the work of the Friends of Attention for a couple of years, so it was a pleasure to meet you at the conference. When Attensity! came out, a friend and I bought it with the idea of thinking about forms of “Attention Activism” here in Madrid. I had heard about the conference and was looking forward to attending, but I wasn’t planning on presenting a paper, until that same friend texted me a photo of that passage with the message: “Your friend Augustine is in Attensity!”

Saint Augustine really has been a longtime friend. The Confessions is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, and I wrote my master’s thesis on Augustine’s notion of intentio (basically, “intention,” but it is a very rich concept) in De Trinitate, which I titled “The Soul’s Striving for Wholeness: The Unitive Role of Intentio in Augustine’s De Trinitate 11.” More recently, my doctoral work focused on Plato’s Phaedrus, but in a way both projects circle around the same questions, which are also the main philosophical questions that I keep thinking about: Why do human beings long for wholeness? What is this wholeness? How do we strive for it?

That question naturally led me to attention. I think attention and wholeness belong together, just as distraction and fragmentation belong together.

DGB: This is a juicy idea. The “integrative” role of attention is perhaps less immediately intuitive to us, these days, than the “fragmenting” or “fissiparous” dynamic of distraction. I wonder why this might be? We often assimilate “attention” to a kind of searchlight beam of focalizing energy that comes out of an already unified consciousness. My own view is that the dominance of this imagery is tied up with the way the discourse around human attention developed in a particular way across the long nineteenth century, when special problems arose in connection with the unity of the human subject. A scientific conception of human attention, as Jonathan Crary has argued, played a powerful role in restabilizing the “shattered sensorium” of modernism. But the pre-modern situation was so different!

MDR: Fair enough. But Augustine has a wonderful expression in the Confessions that feels, I think, surprisingly modern: in multa defluximus, that is, “we have flowed into the many.” We often feel scattered, divided into a manifold, while we yearn for unity and wholeness.

That’s why the line in Attensity! — that attention, for Augustine, is “nothing less than redemptive” — struck me so deeply. Attention, by these lights, indeed becomes a way of gathering ourselves back together, and ultimately of returning toward God, who is perfect unity. I find that an extraordinarily profound way of thinking about attention. It is not just some useful skill for productivity, but it becomes something spiritual, essential to becoming our best selves.

DGB: I personally feel a lot of sympathy for the power of this perspective. In Attensity!, of course, we were invoking the Augustinian vision of “redemptive” attention precisely to heighten the contrast with modern instrumental/operational ideas of our “attention span.” We wanted to remind people of the immense metaphysical, even theological, importance accorded to attention in the past, and to point to the “thinning” of our more current paradigm. But we were moving quickly! In your paper, you go even deeper, since you dig in on the Latin, and show that Augustine actually uses two different Latin terms that English translators generally collapse into the single word “attention.” What is cool is that you show that there are actually some different things going on in the original that seem to get ironed out in the translations. Tell us what the two terms are, and maybe how they differ?

MDR: Because I’ve been interested in attention for a while, it is one of those words that almost jumps off the page whenever I encounter it. That happened when I returned to Book XI of the Confessions, where Augustine reflects on that most puzzling of God’s creations: TIME. At some point, Augustine connects “memory” with the past, “expectation” with the future, and “attention” with…the present — or at least that is how most translations have it. When I checked the Latin, I noticed that Augustine didn’t write attentio there. He uses the word “contuitus.” Let me quote the passage, where he is musing about the paradoxical nature of temporality. It is a famous moment in a famous text:

What now is manifest and clear is that neither are there future nor past things. Nor is it fitly said, “There are three times, past, present and future”; but perchance it might be fitly said, “There are three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do somehow exist in the soul, and otherwise I see them not: present of things past, memoria; present of things present, contuitus; present of things future, expectatio. (Conf. XI.20.26 )

What fascinated me, when I started working on this passage, was that contuitus is really a pretty unusual word.

When you read this in Latin, you notice that contuitus is a less familiar word than “memory” and “expectation”. Translating it simply as “attention” is perfectly reasonable, but it also smooths over something distinctive in Augustine’s language. Something of its oddity, one might say, is ironed out.

It is revealing that, a few passages later, he comes back to this same point and uses, not the verb form for contuitus, but the one derived from attention. Augustine writes that the mind “expects, and attends, and remembers, in order that that which it expects, through that which it attends, may pass into that which it remembers.” Since he changes the terms without much explanation, it seems that contuitus and attentio are more or less the same thing. However, I think that it is interesting to keep these two together without allowing the less known “contuitus” to disappear under the more known (if perhaps often misunderstood) “attention.”

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DGB: So let’s spend some time on contuitus. How can we gloss this term? What might it bring us that attentio/attention doesn’t quite capture?

MDR: A great deal, I think! Contueor, the verb behind contuitus, literally means something like “seeing together.” It is made from that Latin prepositional cum (together) and the verb tueor (to look or behold). It thus suggests a way of holding things together in a single act of vision, the capacity to “see things together as a whole,” which is not a capacity we fully possess, and yet it is this fullness that we yearn for.

DGB: Fascinating. Let’s push into the philology a bit more. You have suggested that the “togetherness” of this kind of seeing has to do with the conjunction of the seeable things, rather than, say, the social or intersubjective register of “together.” Do you think that the term carries any of that energy?

MDR: That’s a very interesting suggestion! I was, indeed, thinking of the capacity to see the interconnectedness of things, as I often think of something Plato says in the Republic: that the philosopher is the one who can view things in their connection. I’m not sure the term contueor itself especially invokes the social register of “together,” but it occurs to me now that the intensive sense of attention the term carries is often enabled by forms of shared attention. When you and a friend attend to the same object together, you’re also aware of your friend’s awareness, and you might experience the object in a richer way, as if you were seeing it with more eyes — and you also experience your friend in a richer way, as you see them through the “eyes” of the object. I’ve had this kind of experience when a friend points out a line of verse in a poem that hadn’t stood out to me; reading the poem again, I feel it open up in a new way just from paying more attention to that line. At the same time, this awareness also opens up something of my friend’s inner life to me. So perhaps seeing things “together” with others is a way of sharpening our attention and finding more of the “togetherness” of things. This also reminds me that Eleonore Stump has used the phenomenon of joint attention in a theological context, suggesting that union with God is a matter of being in a position to share attention with God. I’m now thinking this line could be explored more deeply in an Augustinian context.

DGB: This intersection of the epistemic (perceiving everything clearly in its totality, or “alltogetherness”) and the social (seeing things, together) really goes to the heart of what, I think, matters most about the contemporary push to cultivate, protect, and nourish truly human forms of attention. The big lie of our time is that attention operates like a kind of “first person shooter game” — that attention beams out of us like a laser from the cockpit of our solo fighterplane, as we zip through the universe. This is the model of attention that comes out of Cold War experimental psychology, and that informs the world of the attention economy, and all the pathologies of our contemporary attentional ecosystem. Human attention is social! This is what makes it a world-making force. What do we need? We need a lot more thinking about joint attention. Because this is literally how the world shapes up around us.

MDR: I think that actually resonates beautifully with the Augustine passage cited in Attensity! Human beings never possess God’s timeless/eternal and complete/totalizing vision. Our human grasp of reality (always a time-bound grasp) is forever partial and successive — particular and particulated. However, when we use attention, when we are faithful to “the presence of present things,” in community, we are keeping things whole. In this account, genuine attention temporarily gathers together memory, present awareness, and expectation into a single act of consciousness. This becomes a way of “gathering ourselves up,” and thereby of literally coming closer to the unity of God.

DGB: Doing this in full, with others, would be an authentic “communion” — something like Rosa Celeste of Dante’s Paradiso! We are talking, here, about precisely that “redemptive” conception of attention that so powerfully contrasts with, say, the machinic, track-and-trigger kind of attention that is at stake in our modern “attention economy.” Whether one is a believer or not, whether one has a natural sympathy for this kind of reasoning or no, the Augustinian account certainly thickens our sense of attention’s possibilities. And it would be my view, and, I think, the view of a lot of attention activists, that it is precisely THIS that we need: an expanded sense of promise and scope of authentic human attention. History can help with this. Philosophy too. And, yes, even philology! Does Augustine use the word contuitus — this “seeing together” kind of attention — elsewhere?

MDR: Yes, and those passages reinforce this redemptive vision of human attention. Elsewhere Augustine uses contuitus to describe a kind of intellectual vision — a mode of attention directed toward realities that have no images at all: logical truths, the nature of love, ultimately even God.

That helps explain why contuitus occupies such a privileged place alongside memoria and expectatio. While, in Augustine’s account, animals can have a memoria and expectatio (at least of a certain kind), only human beings are capable of the type of vision contuitus entails. It names, for him, a uniquely human capacity for what we might call “contemplative vision.”

In that sense, contuitus — the “present of present things” — is also the mode of awareness least dominated by the dispersal of time.

DGB: Ah! That is a lovely characterization…

MDR: In this reading, it is in contuitus that finite human consciousness comes closest to participating in God’s eternal present.

DGB: Very beautiful. I have a soft spot for this aspiration. Needless to say, however, not everyone does. The desire to transcend the human condition has a bit of a checkered history, no? I recall a conversation I had with the American philosopher Cornell West many years ago. He brushed back my youthful yearnings for transcendence with vigor:

Well, see, for somebody like myself, a Chekhovian Christian, I don’t want to transcend the human at all. I want to revel in the human, acknowledge the call for help, connect back to the human sources that sustain me in space and time and human history. I don’t think the transcendence of the human is a positive move in any direction.

Is the highest calling of contuitus, in your view, a flight from the human condition? Does Augustine think of it this way?

MDR: When I think of the “flight from the human condition,” I think of the transhumanists, who want to flee from all the limitations that accompany the human condition. Since Francis Bacon said that the end of knowledge is “the relief of man’s estate,” this idea has been at the core of much of our technological progress. In this sense, “transcendence” of the human means annihilating human limitations through human-made means. Pope Leo has called this out in his new encyclical:

Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.

However, there is a different sense of transcendence, in which the human is not annihilated but fulfilled. Our desire for a perfectly integrated vision — the sort of contuitus God may have — and all our other yearnings for infinitude are legitimate, because we are made for a perfection that is not, however, the work of our hands, but a gift of grace that can only be possessed after we’ve embraced the ultimate boundary of death. The imperfect human ways of aiming at this perfection are precisely the human ways of attaining it. Augustine would call this a way of living in hope, rejoicing “already” in the “not-yet.”

DGB: I agree with you: I found that section of chapter three of Magnifica Humanitas deeply affecting, the section in which Pope Leo rejects Elon-Musk-style transhumanism in forceful terms. Basically, in Leo’s analysis, our actual virtues and beauties — our courage, our generosity, our patience, even our ability to love — are a function of our limits, of our limitedness. In a way, I wonder if we could say something similar about human attention? A divine mind, infinite in its capacities — could one even speak of such a mind putting its “attention” here or there? On this or that? There is something almost oxymoronic about the very idea! Such a mind is ubiquitous, conjoint, consistently coextensive with all its objects, without exception or shadow. The language of “attention” in our sense feels inadequate to this situation, since for us attention is, in effect, a way of trying to manage the problem of our limitations, the partialness and fragmented nature of our consciousness.

MDR: Right. I think Augustine would say that attending to the present is precisely a way of resisting the soul’s tendency to scatter itself among countless desires, anxieties, memories, and anticipations. Scrolling on our phones is almost the perfect image of that scattering. Nothing is ever truly present; everything is already passing into something else.

By contrast, every genuine act of attention — whether in prayer, contemplation, friendship, study, or the experience of beauty — becomes a small act of recollection. It gathers us back into ourselves, and ultimately toward God. Perhaps that is what Simone Weil meant when she wrote that “attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives access to God.” I think Augustine would agree. “Moments of authentic contemplation” — as I found in Attensity! — are certainly “nothing less than redemptive”... and it is a great joy when we experience this, for it is this kind of redemptive wholeness that we long for.

What separates humans from animals? According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, it’s our capacity not only to want things (ice cream, sex, vacation) but also to want to want things (to read more books, to exercise more regularly, to be more politically engaged). He calls this latter kind of wanting “second-order desire.” Our “first-order” desires are the ones that tend to guide our impulses; our second-order desires seek to change them.

Second-order desires aren’t always fulfilled (ask most people around January 31st how their New Years resolutions are going), but in the best of cases, they are the means by which we shape ourselves and the ways that we behave in the world. That’s the principle behind Gayatri Spivak’s claim that education is “the non-coercive rearrangement of desire.” Experiences of teaching and learning can give people the tools to satisfy their second-order desires by rearranging their first-order desires. This is education as self-formation.

Human fracking hijacks the wiring of our first-order desires at the expense of our second-order desires. We want not to be scrolling headlines all morning, but some knee-jerk reflex keeps our thumb on the screen. We want a healthy democracy, but it feels impossible not to blame “the other side.” Frankfurt’s notion of “second-order desire” becomes especially useful when our second-order and first-order desires fall so wildly out of whack. It’s especially urgent, too: our ability to want (first order) what we want to want (second order) is nothing less than the ability to choose who and how we are in the world. It’s the basis of our freedom.

This week, we’re writing about DESIRE. In Visions of Attention, Haena surfaces Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT’s “expanded cinema” performances, which staged acts of anti-cinematic desire in public spaces. Phil Nguyen meditates on an itch in Practice in Practice, while Czarina shares readings on eroticism, psychoanalysis, and AI-generated romantic fiction in Stuff for Study. Finally, in IRL, we invite you to our upcoming seminar on SIMONE WEIL, one of the great thinkers (and practitioners) of human attention in the twentieth century.

Libidinally 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

Tap and Touch

Does cinema produce desire or portray it? Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT short-circuits this question through “expanded cinema,” a kind of performance in which the attentional dynamics of cinema are staged beyond the screen. What characterizes cinema in her work is not the materiality of camera and celluloid but its orchestration of a distanced yet intimate form of address.

TAPP und TASTKINO (TAP and TOUCH CINEMA) is one of the best known examples of her intervention. Standing in the streets of Vienna, she donned a bulky square box on her torso, inviting strangers to put their hands in the two holes in the box to touch her breasts. Unlike other provocative performances such as Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) in which she flashed her pubic hair through a strategic slash in her jeans, the sexualized parts of EXPORT’s body were not readily visible. Cleverly disguised by curtains draped on the two holes, this mini-cinema of the artist’s body inverted the colloquial directive to “look, but don’t touch.” And if one considered why this experience was so jarring, bitterly comical, or unsettling in some other manner, it would reveal how much of cinematic desire is usually communicated through vision as it merely insinuates, but continues to defer, the possibility of touch.

It is not merely that the female body is objectified through cinema — the female body is rendered cinematic. It is the site where power is exchanged and where the theater of selective concealment and revelation unfolds. VALIE EXPORT’s callout of this fact using her own body puts her in a box for the moment — but EXPORT’s cheeky smile in the photo documentation of TAPP und TASTKINO suggests that she’s in on the act.

— Haena Chu

Practice in Practice

Reflections on experiments in Attention Activism

An Itch of the Mind

Recently, while on a walk around a campsite in Massachusetts, I was stung by a wasp. Waves of pain radiated from the locus of a tiny red dot on my index finger, forcing me away from the company of a familiar loneliness. Bullseye. The demonic little bugger had found its mark.

Back at camp, my mind did what minds do best: it began generating stories of what had happened. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to rock climb with my friends and my partner anymore, the original plan for the trip. I pondered what it’d be like to play my guitar with three fingers when I came back home.

And then, slowly, as those around me attended to my swelling appendage with tubes of antihistamine, I turned my attention to the pain itself. This might seem like a perverse thing to do but, being a longtime meditator, I wanted to know what I was really experiencing as “pain.” Put another way, how did I know I was in pain? What was the word “pain” abstracting me from?

When I set about doing this, I came into closer contact with the sensations I was experiencing: an intense but intermittent throbbing across the pulp of my index finger, and a strange sense of my elbow and my hand being tied together by a thin throughline. My finger started to feel less like a contained, centralized object within the locality of my body than an oceanic net of lively vibrations.

Eventually, all of this gave way to something more uniform, i.e. that of a persistent itch. It accompanied me up the rocks (I did end up climbing) and into my sleeping bag. It followed me back to Brooklyn the next day. I tried concentrating on it, both to divert myself from the instinct to scratch and to divide the itch into its constituent sensations, but my impulses got the better of me.

I clawed at my finger, despite knowing that it would only worsen the itch. And this, too, presented itself as a Buddhist lesson in real-time: namely, that itches always want to be scratched, and that there are many ways to scratch them, some better than others. My itch, thankfully, has found its way here, to your attention, in the form of digital ink.

— Phil Nguyen
SoRA community member

Stuff for Study: Wish Lists

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• Snarge, the animal casualties of our insatiable desire for acceleration — Gary Kroll for Aeon

• Indifference and the death of desire in psychoanalysis — Michelle Rada for Parapraxis

• Internet surveillance has killed eroticism — Kate Wagner for Lux Magazine

• The A.I. romance factory producing infinitely customizable genre fiction — Vauhini Vara for Bloomberg

• Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure — Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson for The Guardian

• Culture war as imitation game: On René Girard’s mimetic desire — Luke Burgis for The New Atlantis

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Wed, August 12th: Join us for our IRL seminar on SIMONE WEIL, one of the twentieth century’s most uncompromising philosophers of attention. Enroll HERE!

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

Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!

In case you haven’t heard, a short-spined raccoon in Seattle has scampered into the hearts of humans worldwide. Seattleite Kiana Hall uploaded footage of the round-statured creature, initially mistaken for a cat, and bestowed the name Jimothy on the animal (he “just looked like a Jimothy to me,” Hall declared). Among locals, Jimothy has inspired murals and tattoos, with a city councilmember declaring the season “Jimothy Summer.” Internet users are propagating images and videos of Jimothy alongside wholesome, hopeful messages, heralding the raccoon as an icon of disability and authentic living.

Jimothy joins a long lineage of beloved celebrity animals, including Moo Deng, Punch the Monkey, and Flaco the Central Park Owl. Even before the days of viral internet hype, animals were launched into fame as the faces of film, sports, and consumer brands. As with humans, animal fame can be short-lived – and oftentimes detrimental to the celebrity in question. Local wildlife experts have voiced concern over excessive attention to, and interference with, Jimothy’s habits, urging Jimothy-watchers to keep a safe distance. Some concerned observers have even urged authorities to capture Jimothy and place the raccoon in a zoo to protect him from human harm.

Can our short-spanned critter crazes be nurtured towards longer commitments of care? This is the idea of “making kin,” as biologist and feminist scholar Donna Haraway writes: “By kin I mean those who have an enduring mutual, obligatory, non-optional, you-can’t-just-cast-that-away-when-it-gets-inconvenient, enduring relatedness that carries consequences. I have a cousin, the cousin has me; I have a dog, a dog has me.” How might our affection towards the Jimothies on our screen transform our ways of inhabiting our shared home?

In this issue, we’re turning our attention to kinship. In Visions of Attention, Haena studies the human-horse bonds of Siberia’s Pazyryk tribe. In From the Cup, artist-researcher kyle barnes reconsiders our disgust towards vermin. In Stuff for Study, I share artist Jenny Odell’s practice of seeing with soft eyes and philosopher Jane Bennett’s attribution of life to the inanimate. And in IRL, we highlight SoRA’s next seminar, where we’ll practice kinship with… GHOSTS!

Read on!

Relationally 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

Hold Your Horses Close

A tribe that inhabited the Altai Mountains of Siberia, the Pazyryks maintained a lifelong bond to horses that was crucial to their nomadic lifestyle and trading — so much that horses are found on tattooed mummies dated to the Iron Age (6th to 3rd centuries BC). This may be surprising considering that they almost never revealed skin in public. As something literally inked into the skin, these elaborate designs suggest the relationships that can be created through embodied attention even when they are not intended to be appreciated in public: the vulnerable ritual of receiving the tattoo, new attitudes and beliefs that it imbues on the individual, and its intentional preservation long after other body parts have disintegrated.

In “Inked: Human-Horse Apprenticeship, Tattoos, and Time in the Pazyryk World,” Gala Argent emphasizes that horse riding was seen as an apprenticeship in learning the language of horses, and experienced horses continue to be seen in Eurasian equestrianism as “schoolmasters” that bring their individualized techniques to train riders. As horses and humans grow together, horses also become a measure of time and mark the milestone events of a person’s life. While the mutual human-horse bond was shared by the community overall, tattoos mark skin, or the very “interface” between individual bodies and the world, drawing attention to the connection between personal interspecies bonds and larger symbolic, cosmological systems.

— Haena Chu

From the Cup

Archived essays from our community of thinkers

Consider the Vermin

“In a time where our attention is bought and sold, the beings that evoke our disgust make for compelling foils to the gleaming digital surfaces engineered to canalize our most visceral desires. The disgusting creature or object confronts us with its impurity, driving us to rid ourselves of the disgusting thing. In this way, disgust walls us off from curiosity, connection, and understanding.

A different relationship to vermin is possible. In exploring it, we might also find the beginnings of a new relationship to urban ecology, to the city as a whole, and even to our own attention.”

— “Why study disgust?” by artist-researcher kyle barnes

Stuff for Study: Proof of Kinship

Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics

• A little more than kin — Richard Powers for Emergence Magazine

• Living within contaminated homelands — Lillian Pearce for Aeon

• The philosopher who believes in living things — Morgan Meis for the New Yorker

• Seeing with soft eyes — Jenny Odell for Longreads

• The nuclear family: how a complex became a norm — Brian Connolly for Parapraxis

— Czarina Ramos

IRL

• Mon, August 3rd: Join us for our IRL seminar GHOST HUNTING, where we will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. Enroll HERE!

• Wed, August 5th: 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!

This past fall, schools across the country took desperate measures to solve The Phone Problem™. My peers and I watched as administrators implemented blanket bans, sealed devices into locked pouches, and begged us students to tuck away those little lightboxes and make some real connections. Bell-to-bell phone bans were enacted in public high schools across the state of New York, plunging us into this brand new phone-free utopia.

The effect? We gathered in hallways with card games and crafts. We documented our school days on old-school “cameras.” Some of us even turned up with bedazzled walkie-talkies to allow us to communicate with friends offline. We smiled at each other in the hallways, eyes no longer glued to an endless flow of digital media. We got creative. We got social. This, at least, was the vision for a phone-free school day – and, to some extent, it’s become reality. Over the course of the past year, I’ve learned a dozen new card games, and my screentime dropped to an all-time low – thanks in large part to the state-mandated seven hours I spent unplugged each day.

Except, the idyllic image of low-tech teens immediately shattered when the clock struck three. As a witness from the front lines of twenty-first century adolescence, I can confirm that most students whipped out their phones at the sound of the final bell. Teens emerged en masse from the front doors of my New York City high school, gazes fixed on their devices. Screentime skyrocketed in the late afternoon to make up for lost time.

Legislation doesn’t fix addiction. Forcing kids to hand over devices from eight to three doesn’t teach sustainable habits that we can use in our daily lives. These bell-to-bell bans are slapping a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, failing to fix the core issue at hand: social media apps are designed to keep us hooked. They pump content into vulnerable minds, tweaking hidden algorithms to get just a few more minutes of our sweet, profitable attention. While these new phone policies take a step towards providing a safe space for teen attention, they don’t give youth the tools we need to function in this rapidly evolving digital world. Whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay; how can we learn to coexist with it while protecting our autonomy?

I see it firsthand – teens desperate to find a way to combat phone addiction. My friends and I have tried dozens of screentime-limiting apps and mindfulness tactics, but these efforts rarely suffice. The solution is twofold. First and foremost, we must educate ourselves on the forces at play that keep us craving content. Second, we must carve out sanctuaries of attention, places where we can protect and nourish our attention without the influence of tech corporations.

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In the summer of 2024, a group of New York City teens – as well as students from across the country – came together at the Strother School of Radical Attention to do just that. The Attention Scholars Program, which I’ve attended for two years and counting, has served as a space for the cultivation of attention and the fostering of important dialogue surrounding the role of tech in our lives as teens coming of age in the digital era. Building this youth-focused coalition centered around activism and education is a vital step in safeguarding teen attention. An attention sanctuary is a safe haven for the nurturing of human attention. In the wake of phone bans, school became an attention sanctuary for many, but sanctuaries can also come in other forms. When my friends and I gather to cook and bake together on weekend evenings, the kitchen becomes a sanctuary. As my peers and I rehearse collaborative works of theatre, the stage is our haven. In the summer of 2024, I joined five other high schoolers in the School of Attention’s Dumbo space for an experimental and formative week. We analyzed texts, engaged in practices of attention, and learned how to reclaim the attention that corporations were (and still are) commodifying. That test run blossomed the following summer, expanding into a cohort of over twenty young attention activists eager to make change in our personal lives and the world at large.

“By learning as a group about the mechanisms deliberately trapping our attention, I began to shift from thinking of my screen time as an issue of personal discipline to thinking of it as an issue that we can take collective action to improve,” Maeve Collins, who attended the program in the summer of 2025, attested. Clara Chen, a two-time Attention Scholars participant who also aided with recruitment and development of the program in its second year, shared that the diverse range of perspectives in the program’s discussions helped her “see how other people understand attention activism for themselves.”

The Attention Scholars Program inspired in me a sense of personal agency. Growing up in the digital age, I’d spent years feeling helpless, trapped in cycles of content engineered by tech companies in order to maximize profit and seize human attention – i.e., my eyeballs. For the first time, I had the education and the will to combat these patterns and take control of my attention alongside other passionate teens. We built a coalition; we created a sanctuary.

“My time at the Strother School snapped me back into reality,” Helina Lo, a 2025 Attention Scholars alum, shared. There’s still work to be done, she says. “There’s definitely a gap in our culture, and we collectively need to be having more conversations about how to regulate screens.”

This summer, a fresh crew will enter the Dumbo space, myself among them. We’ll read and dissect excerpts of William James and Shoshana Zuboff. We’ll walk the streets of Brooklyn and take in that which is so often ignored. We’ll attend to one another, wholly and readily. We’ll shut off our phones – by choice this time – and inhabit the sanctuary we create.

Consuelo “Leo” Burnett is a teen writer and artist based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in Empty Inkwell Review and on The Hinternet, and her poetry has received national recognition from the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Find her on Instagram [at] leogaudes.

Enrollment is now open for the 2026 Attention Scholars Program for high school students ages 14-18. The program will run from Monday, August 31 to Friday, September 4 at our Sanctuary in Brooklyn, NY. Scholarships available.

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 his legendary sit beneath the Bodhi tree that became the way of the Dharma, first spoken here at deer park: 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.

The five bhikkhus sitting before the Buddha had once practiced asceticism at his side, until he chose the Middle Way. To them, his moderation looked like giving up. Turning their backs, the ascetics cast him into isolation. It was there, in seclusion 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 extricable from the very path by which it 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.

—

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!