A Class of Our Own
On attention as a school
Friends!
When we founded the School of Radical Attention in June of 2023, we knew that its name was something of a provocation. What on earth is a “School of Radical Attention,” after all? Over the past three years, our coalition of Attention Activists has sought to answer that question, and to body forth the resulting vision into the world: we are a community of teachers and learners dedicated to studying the emancipatory and worldbuilding powers of human attention.
But there is a second way of interpreting our name. According to this second reading, attention is not what is studied at the school; it is the school itself. Attention, in other words, is the mind- and soul-space in which we encounter the world and each other. All of the ways we learn and grow as humans take place within the bounds of our own attention, the umwelt of a free mind.
This alternative view anchors the title of SoRA’s upcoming residency at the National Academy of Design: ATTENTION IS A SCHOOL. Over the course of four weeks in March and April, we’ll be imagining the future of school at the Academy’s gallery space in Chelsea (right beside The High Line). If you’re in New York, we hope you will join us at our gallery opening party on Tuesday, March 31st from 6 to 8pm. REGISTER HERE.
To learn more about our upcoming month of utopian pedagogy, visit our Art Programs page. And to think through the possibilities of “the school”... read on!
Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
This is Your Brain on Your Brain
In 1978, researchers at EMI Laboratories captured the first magnetic resonance images of a human brain. These black-and-white snapshots revealed the brain’s intricate architecture by mapping hydrogen atoms in the body’s water through their behavior in a magnetic field – the first time humanity had ever seen itself at the scale of the atom. It was a monumental achievement that advanced the relatively new field of neuroscience. It was also a strange and unprecedented encounter: the brain was seeing itself function. Using the invisible, relational force of the magnetic field as its backdrop, the MRI produced something like a map of human thought, a static snapshot that stood to change the medical field forever.
The MRI measured and made legible the biological correlates of our psychological beingness while providing invaluable insights and life-saving care. In doing so, it brought into direct conversation two ways of thinking about the human brain: the mechanical and the irreducible. Just as a map of the atom cannot account for the unquantifiable characteristics of aliveness – our emotions, our sense of the sacred, the indefinable qualities of the heart, the MRI was never intended to examine more than our neural activity. Yet there it is, happening onscreen: the pulsing colors of a mind in motion. The MRI is an example of how our attempts to quantify human experience always gesture beyond their own technical limitations. What’s possible when we examine these maps with an eye to the mechanistic and the transcendent views of human existence? How might we come to see these two accounts not in contradiction but as mutually constitutive stories of what it means to be us?
Stuff for Study: Schools of Thought
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
Can we find freedom in education? — James Brooke-Smith for Aeon
The historical context of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Bernardo Bianchi for Jacobin
My life as an academic article — Marci Kwon for Parapraxis
Democratic education is never pure — Joel Suarez for n+1
Personal curriculums: the good, the bad and the ugly of self-study trends — Emily Spinach on Substack
— Czarina Ramos
IRL
Tue, March 31th: The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design. Join us for our gallery opening party from 6-8 PM at the National Academy’s headquarters in Chelsea. RSVP HERE.
Wed, April 1st: Join us for our IRL seminar DOCUMENTING THE DISAPPEARED, where we will consider what it means to give our attention to someone or something we are told not to see. Enroll HERE.
Thu, April 2nd: ATTENTION LAB: STUDY is an experiential, participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention with a focus on STUDY’s role in Attention Activism. Sign up HERE.
Find more workshops, events, and gatherings here!