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At this evening talk with educator and researcher Catherine L. Hansen, we phone Tokyo to discuss what video games and other game media can show us, as laboratories of radical, minor, non-commodified attention. Interactive fiction (IF) lies at the intersection of experimental and avant-garde lineages in art and literature, from Dada and Surrealism to pataphysics and the Oulipo—a mid-century US hobbyist counterculture of coders, cavers, and D&D role-players—and a contemporary community of noncommercial makers and storytellers.

How are avant-garde dreams of revolutionizing everyday life through renewed attention still alive in today’s gaming cultures, from mainstream to marginal? How have they been sustained or challenged by new technologies? How can text democratize the attentional architecture of gaming? Finally, how can we look at games (including IF) as a place where practices of attention become negotiable, communal, newly legible, and unpredictably creative? How can this help us see familiar games differently, and also imagine what games could still be?

In light of these questions, we will talk about and play X is for Examine, a collection of IF games made by Hansen and her University of Tokyo students Lee Carlisle, Chenren Li, and Edwin Zheng, now on view at SoRA’s current exhibition, Beyond Dark Flow.

Led by Catherine L. Hansen, who teaches literature, writing, and game studies at the Center for Global Education, University of Tokyo. She is coeditor/author of In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001-2021 and author of Powers of No: The Infra Noir Surrealist Group (November 2026).

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Join us to celebrate the opening of our first summer show, Beyond Dark Flow: an exhibition that explores games as digital and physical spaces of collective attention, centering on the current landscape of independent gaming communities. For the opening night only, attendees are invited to play—and even co-create—an expanded set of online and physical games from participating artists. Design collective Aging in Play will showcase play boxes, modular parts made from everyday materials that attendees can rearrange to create their own games; artist collective Boshi’s Place offers additional game stations created by their independent developers modeling alternative modes of attention through text, ambient environments, and nonlinear narratives; and researcher and educator Catherine L. Hansen invites us to modify an interactive fiction she developed with University Tokyo students which allows players to “burrow” into an object of choice with close, sustained attention. 

This is a free event. Light refreshments will be provided.

Image courtesy of Boshi’s place.

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.

Simone Weil was a mid-century French philosopher and mystic. Her seminal essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God” introduces the idea that above all else, attention is what school ought to teach us. This practice explores what happens when we direct, in her words, “empty, waiting” thought towards attention itself. 

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Simone Weil is necessary; all are welcome!

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.

While traditional school measures intelligence by the answers we come to, leading thinkers like Maria Popova have long argued for a more expansive version of measuring intelligence. In this Practice, we'll read from Popova's Figuring, which recounts how the astronomer Maria Mitchell transformed her Vassar observatory into an exploratorium — a school built around questions rather than answers, where students kept a "Book of Questions" cataloguing the things that were coming into their awareness as yet unknowable. In this practice, we'll turn our surroundings into an exploratorium of our own, attending to our environment and identifying the knowable unknowns hiding in plain sight.

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Maria Popova is necessary; all are welcome!

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher whose work examined how power operates by shaping behavior and dictating structures of thought not just through force, but through systems of observation, normalization and discipline that become embedded in our everyday life. Foucault's relationship to pedagogy is rooted in his concept of docile bodies, the idea that institutions don't just teach knowledge, they shape individuals into subjects who meet societal needs and fit within the standard model of knowledge. A model that trains their minds and bodies to behave in predictable and regulated ways through discipline, surveillance and repetition.

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Michel Foucault is necessary; all are welcome!

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Augusto Boal is necessary; all are welcome!

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This off-site workshop at Canal Projects hybridizes the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA)’s two core programs, Attention Labs and Sidewalk Studies, engaging attendees in somatic and text-based exercises that break away from conventional audience-art interactions. SoRA’s attentional practice situates touch as a form of knowledge, responding to the tactile and memory-ridden elements of Jakkai Siributr’s exhibition at the gallery and bridging it with the metaphorical “patchwork” of communities lining the Canal Street neighborhood. In addition to Resident Curator Haena Chu, we will be joined by Kathleen Quaintance, who has led two seminars on weaving at the school and will situate attendees’ experience of the exhibition within the critical history of weaving as a creative attentional method.

The workshop will take place at Canal Projects, 351 Canal Street, in the ground level gallery, which is accessed by a small flight of stairs or an ADA accessible lift. Please reach out to Canal Projects at us@canalprojects.org with any questions.

Photo credit: Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, Installation view, Canal Projects, 2026. Courtesy of Canal Projects. Photo by Izzy Leung.

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The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them. 

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On Thursday April 9 6:30-8:30pm, join us for the exhibition opening of Idea, Score, Process, Object (April 9 - May 17, 2026) where you are invited to participate in Ken Friedman’s instructional pieces Rotterdam Exchange (1986) and Not By Carl Andre (2025). Not By Carl Andre was specially created by Friedman for the Strother School of Radical Attention. If you would like to partake in Rotterdam Exchange, please bring objects “made of natural or organic materials: wood, stone, clay, brick, metal, glass, paper, etc.” you are comfortable leaving behind at our space. 

Alongside Friedman’s works, Idea, Score, Process, Object presents on- and offline editions of the The Scores Project archive (co-edited by Natilee Harren, Michael Gallope, John Hicks and designed by Andrew LeClair and E Roon Kang) and various ephemera from historical artists. If you’ve ever wondered where the format of SoRA’s practice cards come from, this is your chance to experience the history of “scores” as an artistic genre through objects you can touch, flip through, and listen to!  

This is a free event, and light refreshments will be provided.

Image: Ken Friedman, Rotterdam Exchange, 1986. Courtesy of the artist.

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) was a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, author, passionate teacher, and deep observer of human behavior. His pedagogy, rooted in an attention to theatrical boundaries and human presence, established him as a pillar of American Theatre. In this workshop, we will draw on the core of his research from his most famous work, Our Town (1938), to explore the question: how do we say goodbye?

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Thornton Wilder is necessary; all are welcome!

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion.

Báyò Akómoláfé is a Nigerian-born philosopher-poet, author, public thinker and tenderly self-monikered “nerd” whose work sits at “the crossroads” of posthumanism, postactivism, animism and Yoruba cosmology. Elegantly rewilding language itself, Akómoláfé “cracks" open our notions of modernity, the anthropocene, colonialism, and decoloniality, wholly re-weaving the fabrics and foundations of our shared existence. In this workshop, excerpts from Selah will re-situate us among certain angles of these fractal, entangled inquiries, calling us into the “curdling middles” where we become critically re-arranged.

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Báyò Akómoláfé is necessary; all are welcome!

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Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.

In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?

This is a three-week seminar convening IN PERSON on Saturdays, April 4th, 11th and 18th from 3:30 - 5:30pm at the National Academy of Design.

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The School of Radical Attention will be IN RESIDENCY at the National Academy of Design from March 31st to April 25th, offering a slate of public programs on the study and practice of radical attention. In this series of hour-long workshops each inspired by a prominent pedagogical thinker, we bring their vision of FUTURE SCHOOLS to life through somatic practice and guided discussion. 

Black Mountain College was an experimental institution that lasted from 1933-1957, emerging from a desire for alternate, progressive education amidst a period of economic crisis and a shifting cultural landscape. With teachers such as Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, the arts were at the core of its pedagogy, along with the values of interdisciplinarity, experimentation, and the idea that living and learning were intertwined. In this workshop, we will draw on these pedagogical approaches to explore the relationship between the practice of art and the practice of life, and ask: how might experimenting with our attention transform our understanding of the world in the times that we are in?

In our attention practice sessions, we use artifacts from the work of visionary thinkers and educators as an occasion for collective experiences of attention. No prior knowledge of Black Mountain College is necessary; all are welcome!

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Kicking off SoRA’s monthlong residency at the National Academy of Design, join us for our opening party from 6 to 8pm on Tuesday, March 31st! We will reawaken various “attentional prosthetics” traditionally found in school environments, and transform their severity into severeness with fierce ballroom performers Rinor Zymberi, Caleb Thomas, and Prince Carhuajulca.

The traditional school environment can be a tool of discipline and normalization. Yet the unyielding diversity of our human attention transforms these limitations into play, humor, and collective memory—much like the joy shared by “houses” that function as alternative schools and chosen families of the ballroom world. We invite you to revel in this vision of renewed joy, enjoy our display of antique school objects, and learn more about SoRA’s upcoming events at the residency.  

Light refreshments will be served. 

About the performers:

Caleb Thomas is a Latinx west coast born choreographer/performance artist. His movement vocabulary has come from his diverse dance training in Hip Hop, Modern, Contemporary, Ballet, Jazz, and Vogue. Now based in NYC, his work is heavily rooted in queer club culture. @calebthomas

Prince Carhuajulca is an Afro-Indigenous Non-Binary Peruvian-Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist focused on dance, poetry, and community organizing, as well as one of the founders of the Ballroom scene in Peru. For the past seven years, she has been organizing balls, dance practices, fundraisers, poetry jams, music and art festivals, and sound-based projects. She always focuses her art into inviting diverse bodies—and especially the bodies of QTBIPOC migrants—to join in and explore the ritual of bodily exploration.@inti.laprince

Rinor Zymberi is an Albanian immigrant hailing from the Bronx. As a proud member of the International House of ELLE, Rinor walks New Way Vogue under the guidance of the International Icon and Pioneer, Stanley DeVaughn. Rinor has also been a vogue instructor at Gibney Dance, Broadway Dance Center, Alvin Ailey Extension, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), Lehman College, SUNY Purchase and Barnard College. Exploring the extremes of movement and contortion in relation to music in and out of the floors of NYC nightclubs. @fairyrinor

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Celebrate with SoRA our first exhibition of the year at the Sanctuary Gallery, which features a collection of archival images guest-curated by Adam Green of Public Domain Review. Public Domain Review is an image archive exploring curious and compelling works from art history that have fallen into public domain. We will be offering a limited quantity of free postcards as well as posters for sale, featuring historical images on attention produced by Public Domain Review. We invite everyone to an informal letter-writing session for those who would like to share the thought-provoking images with loved ones.

This is a free event. Light refreshments will be provided. 

Image courtesy of Public Domain Review and Adam Green. The Conjurer, painting from the workshop of Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1510. The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons.

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Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

This film screening and discussion session spotlights the radical attention adopted by makers and viewers of Latin American revolutionary film. We will view two full-length films and short excerpts of Tercer Cine (“Third Cinema”), a movement born in the late 1960s that urged cinema to catalyze collective action through direct dialogue with audiences and interrogations on filmmakers and critics’ positions in the cultural economy. We will explore questions like: how can the attentional modes of viewership and direct action work for each other? How can creators balance survival with subversive action? How can processes of film-making and viewing incorporate principles of collective action?

La Fórmula Secreta (Rubén Gámez – México, 1965) is a surrealist experimental film that uses symbolic and poetic imagery to explore Mexican identity and its crisis in the 1960s. It centers on the metaphor of a dying man injected with Coca-Cola in an attempt to revive him — an act that instead unleashes a furious cascade of dreamlike images invoking ancestral, colonial, "Hispanic", and modern myths that estrange Mexican subjectivity. Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Cuba, 1968) follows Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual who chooses to remain in Cuba after the Revolution while his wife and friends emigrate to the United States. Through a fragmented narrative style that blends fiction with documentary footage, Sergio reflects on the island’s profound social and political changes between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Missile Crisis.

Tercer Cine was coined by Argentinian filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their manifesto “Hacia al Tercer Cine (Towards a Third Cinema),” who called for the “transformation from mere entertainment into an active means of dealienation” beyond Hollywood (First Cinema) and European auteur cinema (Second Cinema). Its message has resonated beyond the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America into global cinema today.

About the artist

Ana Begoña Armengod (Philadelphia, PA) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist born in Mazatlán Sinaloa. Her art encompasses a wide range of mediums including film, illustration, writing, sculpture, installation, and sound. Her work is tied with nature and its death, as well as the small details that get lost in the bigger picture. Focused on accentuating the overlooked and unimportant, she gives magnitude to human reactions, history, emotion, and the environment while questioning how these things push us to evolve.

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Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

On February 22, visual artist and educator Taeyoon Choi presents Cotton King and A.I. God, a lecture performance unpacking the hidden ties between the cotton industry and A.I. Taeyoon guides us through his research with a custom interactive tool and music, making accessible connections between vast temporal and spatial distances while conveying the complexity of relationships between big tech and invisible labor. We will move through the attentional paths created by his alternative historical map, navigating the shadows of technologies which may at first glance appear ahistorical. 

This performance debuted at Seoul National University in November 2025, and a related site-specific work is featured in the exhibition Technology of Relations at MASS MoCA, on view from February 21.

Image: Taeyoon Choi, Cotton King A.I. God, Acrylics on Canvas, 2025. Courtesy of the artist

About the artist

Taeyoon Choi (Detroit, MI) explores the poetics of science, technology, society, and human relations. He works with computer programming, drawing, and writing, oftentimes in collaboration with fellow artists, experts and community members. His projects, participatory workshops, performances, and installations were presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Van Alen Institute, M+ Museum and more. Choi co-founded the School for Poetic Computation and taught classes there until 2020. Currently, he teaches Digital Art at Wayne State University, and serves on the board of AFIELD, an international network of changemakers.

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At this open workshop, we will learn the basics of screenprinting and create our own upcycled SoRA merch. Bring whatever you want to revamp - old t-shirts, tote bags, or scrap paper - and we’ll provide various logos and our Attensity! Manifesto to mix and match into your one-of-a-kind design. 

We will begin by collectively reading and spending time with the Attensity! Manifesto, which is the crux of SoRA’s movement for attention liberation as well as our upcoming book, Attensity!. Then, we will consider our own personal connection to the different elements of the manifesto by composing our own screenprinted design of the images and text.

This workshop is open to participants with any and all levels of familiarity with printmaking. If you are only available for a portion of this event, we also welcome drop-in visitors to take advantage of the printing station. 

Limited blank totes will be provided for purchase!

Led by Francesca Barr, a teaching artist and writer from Massachusetts. She has led art programming at The People’s Forum, Penikese Island School, and other community organizations. 
@cesca.barr

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Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

Artist duo John Tsung and Leah Ogawa invite us to an evening of slow attention in their interactive installation and performance. Countless strands of white fabric suspended across the space slowly awaken hands, legs, flowers, and other recognizable silhouettes with Leah Ogawa’s puppetry—and steadily dissipate back into a sea of formlessness. John Tsung converses with these movements through music, and will invite attendees to partake in the ensemble through a sound interface that responds to vibrations in the environment.

Image: Leah Ogawa and John Tsung, Divine Generations vol.02, 2023, courtesy of the artists and photographed by Chika Kobari

About the artists

John Tsung (New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and writer whose works explore migration and myth, particularly the concepts of transmigration and impermanence. Drawing on social practice and sound art, his works often involve emergent sounds and the creation of site-specific performance pieces, influenced by his Buddhist upbringing and classical training. Tsung’s installations and works have been performed in the US and Asia and featured in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Interview, and The New York Times. 

Leah Ogawa is an installation artist and puppeteer based in New York City. Raised in Yamanashi, Japan, Leah has worked with puppeteers, artists, and companies including The Metropolitan Opera, La MaMa, Dmitry Krymov, Phantom Limb, Dan Hurlin, Tom Lee, Nami Yamamoto, Loco 7, and others. She has performed across the US as well as at the Quay Branly in Paris and across Asia. Leah is a recipient of the Jim Henson Foundation’s workshop grant for her original piece, Growing Not Dying. Her recent work, Divine Generations with co-creator John Tsung, has been featured in the New York Times.

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Celebrating the launch of Attensity!, the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) holds a series of four participatory events where we will collectively create and test-drive vessels for human attention. Over the course of four weeks, four hosts will activate the Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO with sound, film, objects and movement, and lecture performance. 

Is it possible to experience the precise moment when an object opens itself up as a vessel for human attention? In turn, how does the vessel beckon our belief in its efficacy? On January 29, artist Park Karo attempts to unite belief and materiality through performative objects such as “thought-emptying ceramics” and “mirror reflecting sin,” which inspire audience-driven rituals where the independent reality of these objects encounter the thoughts and intentions released by audiences. We will then collectively build a stone tower that rewilds the TV as a technological artifact, as the artist binds each “stone” - made of porcelain - with attendees by inscribing fictional symbols. Through gestures of drawing, stacking, and burning, these ritual objects will gradually alter and become altered by each participant’s inner life.

Image: Park Karo, Thought Emptying Pottery, 2025. Courtesy of the artist. 

About the artist

Korean-born artist Park Karo (New York, NY) investigates human systems of belief in the form of installation, painting, text, ceramics, video, music, performance, and tattoos. She is interested in the process where beliefs materialize in various knowledge systems from personal myths to science, and foregrounds the role of objects in orchestrating a relational, performative reality. She has exhibited at Subtitled, New York; SeMA Storage at Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Art Space Seogyeo, Seoul; Amado Art Space, Seoul; Alternate Space Loop, Seoul; Humor Garmgot, Seoul; and POST Gallery, Seoul.