Attention Activism 101: ONLINE
Jan 23rd - Feb 6th, 2024
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 Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton 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?
Led by Jac Mullen, writer, teacher, and former Executive Editor of The American Reader.
Classes on Wednesdays, 8:00 - 10:30pm EST
Jan 23 - Feb 6
Online via Zoom
DREAMSTATES
Jan 29th - Feb 12th, 2025
Recent work in the brain sciences suggests that humans are daydreaming 47% of the day and dreaming at night in all stages of sleep. This is a fundamental shift in the way we frame human cognition and experience. We are primarily imaginative creatures; Most of our thought occurs in worlds that might be. And yet we have little language and few tools to interact with our dreaming minds. Many of us ignore our dream life entirely, forget the worlds we make, and share them with no one. What would it mean to attend more fully to our imagining? Can dreaming be a 21st century ‘technique’ for waking life? Can our waking hours, in turn, feed a more beautiful dream life?
This hands-on seminar will put us in touch with these questions, with a particular focus on self-experimentation. We will do this with an eye to dreaming as an expanded mode of perception which we can access even while awake. Dreaming attention is radically unselective, undivided, and nonlinear. The dreamer holds hallucination, disorder and madness close at hand. What would it mean to bring this expansive attention into the day, and daydream more fully? To attend to a landscape in a dream, and then to wake up and walk in it again? This seminar course is focused not on what dreams are, but instead on what this dream-like attention does, and what we can do with it.
Over the course of three weeks, we will read the latest papers on Dream Engineering, then apply their techniques, in practice, to our own dreaming selves. The hope is to explore new modes of attention together — fed by dreams, and feeding dreams in turn. We will read texts on neuroscience, tech ethics, and philosophy of mind. Past knowledge is encouraged but by no means required.
Taught by Adam Haar, an artist, technologist, and scientist specializing in dreams.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Jan 29th - Feb 12th
55 Washington St, Ste. 736, Dumbo
W.F.H.
Feb 20th - Mar 6th, 2025
Digital technologies, particularly the evolution of the smart phone, have profoundly reshaped contemporary notions of home. Domestic space, once understood as a private sanctuary physically bounded from the outside world has drastically transformed into a highly fluid and digitally connected sphere, radically blurring boundaries between home and public life. Remote work and workplace intrusion, home as a social media stage, home as an entertainment hub, and home as the epicenter for shopping and consumption habits are a few of the many ways in which the house has been transformed into a setting for continuous and unavoidable digital contact.
Today, the home is the front line of attention fracking.
This three-session virtual course will bring attention to this radical transformation of our domestic space and interrogate the implications of global connectivity taking over local intimacy. Using the very tools (laptops, tablets, smartphones etc.) and platforms we are critically examining, the seminar will bring together participants from all over the world to examine how digital intrusions have reshaped our private lives. In doing so, we will conceive spatial strategies to reimagine and sustain the life-giving sanctuaries of home and community.
Taught by Felipe Correa, architect and founder of Somatic Collaborative, a NYC-based design practice.
Classes on Thursdays, 8:00 - 10:30pm EST
Feb 20th - Mar 6th
Online via Zoom
THE WORLD WITHOUT WRITING
Mar 13th - 27th, 2024
We're only now grasping the profound impact of the written word as it recedes from our lives. For centuries, text has invisibly shaped our cognition, institutions, and sense of self. Now, as AI models pen Joycean prose while humans increasingly struggle with multisyllabic words, we're witnessing an unprecedented reversal: swarms of machine intelligence processing text with superhuman ability, while adult literacy rates plummet to middle-school levels. Welcome to the Age of Detextualization.
This transformation reaches far beyond mere communication. As AI enables speech-to-data conversion and voice-activated operations, we're transitioning from a text-centric world to one where AI-mediated speech reigns supreme. This shift isn't just changing how we communicate; it's rewiring human cognition and attention at a fundamental level.
Our generation faces a crucial challenge: how to preserve the benefits of literacy as we transition to a potentially post-literate era. Can AI interfaces foster the deep engagement we associate with reading? Is it possible to maintain the clarity of thought cultivated by writing in a world of speech-to-speech communication? Or are we witnessing an inexorable trade, where machines inherit our textual capabilities while humans slip into terminal illiteracy?
This seminar will explore these questions, with special attention to an emerging paradox: as general literacy declines, the cognitive formation provided by deep reading may become even more crucial—perhaps our key to meaningful interaction with increasingly sophisticated AI models in the years ahead.
Led by Jac Mullen, writer, teacher, and former Executive Editor of The American Reader.
Classes on Thursdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Mar 13th - 27th
55 Washington St, Ste. 736, Dumbo
Photo credit: Annea Lockwood’s Piano Burning by Joe Armao, The Age
SOUNDSCAPING
Mar 31st - April 13th, 2025
In a culture dominated by visual stimuli, the cultivation of listening skills often takes a backseat — yet through listening we can engage with and understand our environments in unique and powerful ways. By practicing active listening, we can connect with our surroundings more holistically. This act of listening can expand our perception, inform our spatial, ecological, and political awareness, and provide space to reflect on the passage of time.
In this 3-week course, we will use our ears to unfold a series of intentional, multi-sensory listening exercises that culminate in the creation of a sound walk. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Tarek Atoui, Hildegard Westerkamp, Francisco López, and Christina Kubisch, we will expand auditory awareness through durational exercises that incorporate drawing, movement, sounding, and learning how to direct our listening attention. You’ll also learn how to use basic recording tools and audio tour software.
The course will culminate in a public listening event, where participants can engage with audio tours in person through headphones via the guided audio tour software Echoes.
Led by composer, sound technologist, archivist, and researcher Anastasia Clarke.
Classes on Mondays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Mar 31st - April 13th
55 Washington St, Ste. 736, Dumbo
Image: Mary Ellen Carroll, November 11, 2017 • prototype 180—Phase II: Daringly Unbuilt
The choreographed destruction of the 6513 Sharpview Drive, Houston, Texas
Photograph by: Kenny Trice
TRASH
April 9th - 23rd, 2024
Refuse is the sediment of human existence. It serves as the material foundation of our contemporary life — as it did in the ancient world. But the very processes of production that make our present world possible also imperil its future. Consider sites like Monte Testaccio from 2 CE, where a spoil heap appears as a mountain beside the Tiber River in the Roman landscape — evidence that humans have always been trash-producing machines. Ask any anthropologist: if you want to understand a culture, look at their trash.
But what exactly is trash? How do we decide? What does trash mean— the stuff itself, the ways in which it is made, the ways we treat it — and what kinds of attention does it require? Given the accelerating rate of human-made disasters on Earth, how can we reform our material attention to create a closed cycle and a cyclical feedback loop of use and reuse?
Led by acclaimed conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll, this seminar will draw on design, visual art, architecture, public policy, and even music to see trash anew. With readings from Edouard Glissant, Hannah Arendt, Valeria Luiselli , and others, we'll seek to come into closer relationship with the invisible material processes that drive our world.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
April 9th - 23rd
55 Washington St, Ste. 736, Dumbo
Image: In the Queen’s Field, G. Giraldo
LONG-FORM CAPTURE
April 28th - May 12th, 2024
At its inception, photography was a slow and technical effort. Making an image required attention to physical, chemical, and mechanical processes that unfolded on various timescales. This seminar will explore the modes of attention that go into producing a photograph, and will discuss their relation to the kinds of attention produced by the photograph itself.
We will do so by exploring the spaces between conception, capture, and final image. Participants will make photos using basic photographic techniques such as paper negatives, pinhole cameras, and analog chemical processing.
By slowing down the now-automated capture of the medium, we will seek to rediscover the diverse attentional experiences that go into making an impression of ourselves and our surroundings.
All the while, we will think about the relation of these technical processes to meaning-making. Photographs attempt to trap a moment in the amber of silver halide crystals. Our society's preoccupation with photos is analogous to our obsession with the concept of time. What do we see when we look back?
Led by NY-based photographer G. Giraldo.
Classes on Mondays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
April 28th - May 12th
55 Washington St, Ste. 736, Dumbo
Past Courses:
Ligia Pape, O Ovo (1967)
Psychoanalytic Topologies: Attending to One's Self, Attending to the Other
Nov 11th - 25th, 2024
This seminar takes the structure of the psychoanalytic clinic as its point of departure. From here, we will ask a simple question, “How does one pay attention to one’s self?” While self-awareness might seem straightforward, psychoanalysis posits that there is always an element that escapes our capacity to apprehend ourselves: the psychical unconscious. This unconscious is commonly confused with a closed-off box of hidden memories or repressed experiences. But psychoanalysis understands the unconscious as a self-making mechanism. It is the catalyst that creates us and continuously re-creates us. Paradoxically, the unconscious is only ever understood by virtue of its absence. It is always missing.
How does one pay attention to that which is not apprehensible? In this seminar, we will explore the paradoxical topology of the self. We will ask ourselves what the practice of psychoanalysis can teach us about paying attention to the very part of ourselves — the unconscious — that we can never access. We will explore how this practice differs from other positivist, psychological techniques of self-evaluation. Finally, we will ask how the inclusion of an ‘Other’ orients our understanding of ourselves in the analytic dyad and beyond.
This course will be an entry into the historical, theoretical, and material underpinnings of psychoanalysis. It will introduce its participants to one of the most radical and committed modalities of sustained self-attentiveness.
Taught by Anaís Martinez Jimenez, a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a psychoanalyst in training at the National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis.
Classes on Mondays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Nov 11th - 25th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Credit: Paul V. Cortez
Seeing Through Walls: Captive Audiences and the Carceral State
Nov 6th - 20th, 2024
Mass incarceration today succeeds—tragically—by insulating the majority of free society from the deep injustices of a system that exploits our most vulnerable populations. (Of course, many people are directly affected by the carceral state, and don't need to read a report to understand the damage it is doing.) How do we oppose a system that is adding another layer of exploitation by making incarcerated people and their loved ones products of the attention economy?
We will read selections from Danielle Allen's Cuz (2017), along with writing by Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and others, and we will explore the work of organizations like Worth Rises that are actively mounting nationwide campaigns to ensure people are valued over profit.
Co-taught by Len Nalencz, Professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent and educator at the Bard Prison Initiative, and criminal justice advocate Amber Pedersen.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Nov 6th - 20th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
The History of Happiness
Oct 18th, 2024
In this practice-based seminar, Darrin McMahon will share his long standing research on the history of human happiness. McMahon will frame the session by identifying a number of crucial historical shifts in the way human beings have conceived "happiness" since antiquity. Following a close group reading of a primary text, we will perform a joint Practice of Attention to activate key questions raised by McMahon's research. Participants can expect to leave with a deeper historical sense of "happiness" and human flourishing (and, we dare to hope, with additional first-hand experience of happiness itself!).
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Darrin M. McMahon is the David W. Little Class of 1944 Professor of History at Dartmouth. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale, where he received his PhD in 1998, McMahon is the author, among other books, of Happiness: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), which has been translated into twelve languages, and was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Library Journal, and Slate Magazine.
Friday, October 18, 2024
7:00 PM 9:30 PM
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Credit: Brad Fox
Three Modes of Attention— Plants, Rocks, and Smoke
Oct 9th - 23rd, 2024
In this course, we'll think about and practice radical attention in relation to plants, rocks, and smoke, exploring these three modes of more-than-human attention both in material terms and as metaphor. We’ll look into the history of poetry and prose on such subjects, and we’ll seek to form and reform our own understanding of attention by exploring the relation of this human faculty to the more-than-human world.
Session one: plants. Arturo D. Hernandez refers to densely intertwined plant life as “civilized collectives.” It’s been suggested that plants have up to eighteen senses and remarkable powers of prognostication. In the face of widespread social disorientation and haste, we’ll see what we can learn from such models of exquisite slowness and balanced concentration.
Session two: rocks. Diamond cutters are sensitive to the sound a stone’s carbon lattice makes when it’s held against a polishing scaif—called the stone’s song, which is what gives it life. The thirteenth-century Andalusian writer Ibn ‘Arabi claims Everything wet or dry hears the sound of the muezzin. How do we imagine rocks responding to the call to prayer?
Session three: smoke. Smoke finds cracks and crannies, fills rooms, passes through tiny openings with great elegance. What can that teach us about sensitivity, the smallest movements, subtle understandings? Smoke kills, disinfects, disguises, offers protection. Our minds could do worse than advance like smoke.
Combining roundtable discussion, hands-on activities, and readings from the likes of Arthur Sze, Madhu Kaza, Ibn ‘Arabi, Hugh Raffles, Cesar Calvo, and Arturo D. Hernandez.
Taught by Brad Fox, author of The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Oct 9th - 23rd
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
How to Build an Attention Sanctuary: A Six-Week Journey for Parents and Guardians
Sep 19th - Nov 7th, 2024
An attention sanctuary is a space—physical, mental, or temporal—where meaningful connection flourishes, free from the tug of digital distractions. In our hyper-connected world, attention sanctuaries offer a refuge where families can cultivate presence, rediscover the joy of undivided attention, and shape children's attentional abilities without the warping effects of commercial interests. No attention sanctuary is more critical than the family itself.
Building on the insights from "The Great Rewiring of Parenthood" seminar (see participant feedback HERE), this six-week workshop series invites concerned parents from the greater NY area to join a supportive "parents working group" dedicated to creating attentional sanctuaries for their families.
Who Should Join?
This workshop series is designed for parents, caretakers and guardians who:
Feel overwhelmed by the demands of modern parenting and technology.
Seek practical tools to create more mindful, attentive family environments
Want to connect with a community of parents facing similar challenges
Are open to experimentation and self-reflection in their parenting approach
Join us for this transformative six-week journey as we learn, experiment, and build the foundations for more attentive, connected families in the digital age.
Taught by SoRA Faculty Jac Mullen and Adam Pearce. Jac is a writer, teacher, former Executive Editor of The American Reader, and father living in New Haven, Connecticut. Adam Pearce is a coach, writer, and parent of two living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Classes on Thursdays, 6:45 to 8:45
Part 1: Sep 19, Sep 26, Oct 10
Part 2: Oct 17, Oct 24, Nov 7
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
NOTE: For the integrity of our work together, participation in both Parts 1 and 2 of the course is mandatory; please reach out with questions.
The Choreography of Attention
Sep 10th - 24th, 2024
This course considers dance as a mind-body practice through which we can stretch, deepen, and grow our capacity for sustained attention. By practicing ways of moving, looking, and improvising, we call into focus our sense of time, space, and cooperative relational attention. Exercising these faculties–consciously, together–is a form of embodied attention activism.
In each of the three sessions, participants will move through a guided physical practice grounded in contemporary dance, improvisation, and personal kinetic discovery. We will examine works by landmark choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe and others, explore introductory choreographic methods, and invent our own methods– those yet to be discovered. In our culminating session, participants will develop their own choreographic study through which to practice a specific facet of attention– physical, spatial, temporal, or relational.
Previous dance experience is welcome but certainly not necessary.
Taught by choreographer and dancer Eve Jacobs.
Emma Danon in “Cymatic Studies” by Eve Jacobs
Classes on Tuesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Sep 10th - 24th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Car(ry)ing Across: A Toolkit for Attentive Translation
Aug 21st - Sep 4th, 2024
Novelist Emma Donoghue once stated: “Translators are the closest readers – the ones who pay the most meticulous attention to every shade of meaning of every word.” Literary translation is also widely regarded as a bona fide form of creative writing. But what, exactly, do these statements entail? What should translators pay attention to as readers of a literary text? And what should they draw attention to (or divert attention from) as its writers?
In this hands-on seminar, we will explore such questions by attending to Middle English literary fragments and their modern translations. We will think of translation amply, as a movement between not just languages but dialects and disciplines. In this sense, the course is suited to aspiring or seasoned translators, writers, and artists at large; knowledge of a foreign language is encouraged but by no means required.
During the first two sessions, we will develop a toolkit of widely applicable translational strategies and procedures. We will then use them in our own careful renderings of literary works. Participants will have the option to translate brief texts from a foreign language into English, from one English dialect or register into another, or from a verbal to a non-verbal art form. The third session will be devoted to presenting and workshopping our creations.
We will support our attentional exercises with readings by St. Jerome, Schleiermacher, and Jakobson, among others.
Taught by Argentine writer and translator Josefina Massot.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Aug 21st - Sep 4th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Hidden Cities: Urban Form, Infrastructural Attention, and the Future of New York
Jul 17th - 31st, 2024
Urban forms are the unnoticed blueprints of the cities we all inhabit. They shape our daily lives in profound ways. With the proper attention, these hidden forms reveal a great deal about how cities are built, regulated, inhabited, and reinvented.
From the precise proportions of Manhattan’s gridiron block to the regulatory frameworks that shaped Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) in Midtown, and from the gradual transformation of industrial waterfronts into parks to the repurposing of derelict transportation infrastructure, the design of abstract spatial frameworks has been instrumental in choreographing how we live, work, and play in the contemporary city. In most cases, little or no attention is paid to the processes and design concepts that produce the urban settings that we encounter daily. Yet concealed within the urban form of cities, we can find many clues that reveal the hidden logics of our city's past, present, and future.
By reading, interpreting, and translating historic and contemporary city maps, our seminar will share techniques on how to become an urban design sleuth. Participants will begin to identify the design and regulatory frameworks that have shaped the politics and topology of the New York Metropolitan Region. Over the course of the seminar series, each participant will produce and present a schematic urban vision before a panel of urban design experts.
Taught by Felipe Correa, architect and founder of Somatic Collaborative, a NYC-based design practice.
Image Credit: Felipe Correa / Somatic Collaborative.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Jul 17th - 31st
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Image credit: Yuko Shimizu.
Slow Burn: Radical Attention and Collective Action in an Age of Crisis
Jul 2nd - 16th, 2024
Crisis is the eternal attention-grabber. It can create the conditions for unique forms of collective attention, and generate otherwise impossible feats of collective action. But crises can also erode our capacity for sustained attention. Exhaustion and fear can leave us vulnerable to the squeakiest wheels of the attention economy — especially when attention itself is already in crisis.
These tensions make the pursuit of attention in crises doubly challenging and profoundly important in an age of cascading disasters and climate calamity. But there is no need to go it alone. Our seminar course will gather learners to experiment with these tensions in attention and crisis through attention practices and discussions that explore the following questions:
To what and whom do we give ourselves – our attention, our time, our love – when the world seems to be coming undone? What does collective attention look like? How does it change our relationship to crisis? What can we build when we defy the divisive distractions of crises, and gather our attention towards a radical recovery, reckoning, and reimagining?
The work of community practitioners, disaster scholars, climate activists, sci-fi makers, and poets will accompany us along the way. We’ll consider disaster sociology, case studies of crisis community action and mutual aid, and artworks of utopian/dystopian imagination. And we’ll redesign practices commonly used by emergency managers – risk assessments, asset/power mapping, and disaster scenario exercises – to challenge and nourish our individual and collective attention.
Taught by disaster resilience advocate and illustrator Alana (Frank) Tornello.
Classes on Tuesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Jul 2nd - Jul 16th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Early Imperial Roman perfume bottles
Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art
A Geography of Olfaction: Materials, Ecologies, Relations
Jun 19th - Jul 3rd, 2024
Smell is a material and spatial relation, historic and evolving. Smells are made in time and place, and practices of identification, extraction and rendering shape their valence. The sense is inseparable from the political life through which it circulates — characterized today by an ensemble of human industrial affective processes. And yet, it reverberates in with an undetermined surplus of traditional, scientific and embodied knowledge.
In this course, we will attend to the sense of smell in and as a historical milieu, inquiring into the ways it conditions knowledge about place, people, and things. Supported by readings from Karl Marx, C. Nadia Seremetakis, Kathleen Stewart and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, we will challenge the contours of our notions of (olfactory) essence, and enact a sensory research methodology of walking, tasting, harvesting, distilling and composing a fragrance together.
Taught by Leonora Zoninsein, Geographer and Perfumer of Night Air Scent Studio.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Jun 19th - Jul 3rd
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
The Great Rewiring of Parenthood:
Attention, Tech, and the Future of Child-Rearing
May 29th - Jun 12th, 2024
Contemporary parenthood is defined by a central contradiction: although we put more stock in parenting than perhaps any other society in human history, the average parent is more isolated than ever before, expected to shoulder the vast responsibilities of child-rearing as a solitary burden.
This seminar will explore this tension by examining parenthood within the context of the attention economy. In particular, we will explore the ways in which the current discourse around technology — Are attention-capture technologies harmful to children? What does it mean to have a “healthy” relationship to addictive technology? — restages, and even amplifies, the same set of contradictions, forced choices and double-binds that characterize contemporary parenthood more broadly.
We will follow the historical transition of parenthood from a communal endeavor embedded within extended kin networks, to a largely individualized consumerist pursuit freighted with unique anxieties. We will consider how parents view attention-capture technologies both as potential threats to their own children, but also as a means to alleviate some of the unmanageable burden of contemporary parenting itself.
Through a series of case studies, we will address topics like parental "technoference," surveillance parenting, and claims of a technology-driven “great rewiring” or “great resocialization” of childhood. We will consider how technology can serve as a substitute for traditional child-rearing supports, while also contributing to the very conditions — the corrosion of community — that necessitate its use.
Importantly, this course is not just for parents/guardians (or even just for those who work with children), but is rather designed for, and open to, anyone interested in the special problems of person formation, intergenerational transmission, and social reproduction in our current moment.
Taught by Jac Mullen, writer, teacher, and former Executive Editor of The American Reader.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
May 29th - Jun 12th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Bring into Focus:
Attention & the Camera in Film
April 29th - May 13th, 2024
What is the relationship between attention and the camera in filmmaking? Could the camera be said to be imitating the movement of human attention? What are film’s tools for choreographing the viewer’s attention — and to what end?
In this workshop / seminar course, we’ll investigate the way attention sits at the heart of cinematic storytelling. We’ll discuss framing, shot duration, lighting, editing, and more, in order to deepen our understanding of how the medium works. Then we’ll explore what the tools of filmmaking can reveal to us about the nature of attention itself.
To aid us in our inquiry, we’ll watch groundbreaking films like RaMell Ross’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (USA, documentary, 2018), Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (France, drama, 2019), and David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (USA, drama, 2017). Over the course of three weeks, we’ll produce short film exercises that draw upon our theoretical discussions. No equipment or prior filmmaking is required.
Taught by filmmaker, writer and Sundance Fellow Alyssa Loh.
Sunset Boulevard, 1950
Classes on Mondays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
April 29th - May 13th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
The course will culminate in a free, public Attention Lab.
Look, Here, Now
April 1st - April 15th, 2024
“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” — Marcel Duchamp
In the 65 years since Duchamp made this pronouncement, the idea that an artwork is completed by the viewer has become near-universally accepted. In that time, however, the volume of artwork being produced, exhibited, and disseminated has grown exponentially. This acceleration has been driven, among other factors, by the attention-capture technologies and profit models that undergird how we observe and share works through online platforms.
What can a viewer do for art — and what can art do for a viewer — in an era of attentional scarcity?
Look, Here, Now is a three-week seminar course that introduces students to a variety of attentional modalities as experienced through contemporary artworks. Focusing on durational and performative pieces, each class explores artwork through a distinct sense receptor: vision, hearing and movement. We will examine works by William Forsyth, Pauline Oliveros, Janet Cardiff, and Irwin Wurm, among others, and activate a number of attentional exercises including deep listening and slow looking.
Taught by visual artist William Lamson.
Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculpture
Classes on Mondays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
April 1st - April 15th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
Zen and the Art of Attention
March 4th - March 18th, 2024
Attention and distraction can seem like new problems—part of our distinctively contemporary life—yet there is a rich history of contemplative practice stretching back thousands of years and across continents. Almost all spiritual traditions include some form of quiet sitting and contemplation; these practices could be considered technologies of attention, part of our collective cultural heritage. Can they offer new ways of relating to the commercialized attention economy we live in today?
This seminar offers an introduction to one such tradition, Zen Buddhism, as seen through the enigmatic and poetic essays of the great thirteenth-century Zen teacher, Eihei Dogen. We will engage in close reading of three key works: “Genjokoan” (Actualizing the Fundamental Point), “Sansuikyo” (Mountains and Rivers Sutra) and “Uji” (Time-Being). The course will culminate in an Attention Lab which will include an opportunity to experience the practice of Zen meditation.
Taught by visual artist, writer and Zen practitioner Sal Randolph.
Dogen, c. 1253, unknown painter
Classes on Mondays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
March 4th - March. 18th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
The course will culminate in a free, public Attention Lab.
The Poetics of Attention
February 21st - March 6th, 2024
The history of lyric poetry is a long-running experiment in human attention. Lyric becomes itself when it succeeds in making us attend differently to language: more closely, more slowly; with our ears open, even in silence; over and over again. It makes us attend to the world differently, too, as translated by metaphor, and broken open by lines. Lyric calls attention to attention as no other kind of language does.
Over three sessions this class will explore the ways that lyric poetry stimulates our capacity to meet its attentional appeals. Readings from literary theory, philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience will guide and inform our questions. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Renée Gladman, Kurt Schwitters, and others will serve as our objects. (As is only fair, we will volunteer ourselves to serve as theirs.) Our collective project will be to develop an account of the special kind of attention that we give to poetic language, and its relation both to material perception and to interpretation. These are basic questions, down near the roots of words and things, where they are hardest to tell apart. From there we will try to work up and together towards possibilities of linguistic alertness and aliveness that might also reshape the way we lead our lives in company.
Taught by Jeff Dolven, poet and Professor of English at Princeton University.
Classes on Wednesdays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
February 21st - March 6th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
The course will culminate in a free, public Attention Lab.
The Learning Industry:
Attention, Tech, and the Future of Education
January 31st - February 14th, 2024
For decades, the concept of attention occupied a prominent if ill-defined role within the American classroom. Above all, ‘attention’ was seen through the lens of student discipline: students who ‘had’ attention could ‘pay’ it, and thereby follow the teacher’s instructions, while students who struggled with behavior were said to have a ‘deficit‘ of attention.
This situation has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. The proliferation of technologies for capturing, measuring, and monetizing attention has led to the creation of a new education technology (‘EdTech’) industry which is fundamentally transforming the ways in which student attention is managed and engaged in the classroom.
The Learning Industry will explore the various ways in which educators, scientists and technologists have sought to act upon student attention within classrooms— to cultivate, focus, capture, redirect, routinize, automate, gamify, condition, immerse, and supplement attention for educational ends. We will touch on key moments in the history of attention within pedagogical theory and practice; explore different conceptions of the role of attention within education; and imagine EdTech’s classroom of the future—a classroom characterized by gamification, XR, and artificial intelligence.
Finally—and most importantly— we will consider a range of alternative pedagogies which do not seek to capture or instrumentalize student attention, but which rather pursue, as their ultimate aim, the formation or emancipation of student attention as such.
Taught by Jac Mullen, writer, teacher and former Executive Editor of The American Reader.
B.F. Skinner, The Technology of Teaching (1968)
Classes on Wednesdays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
January 31st - February 14th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
The course will culminate in a free, public Attention Lab.
The Ethics of Attention: Activism, Community, Sanctuary
Nov. 1st - Nov. 18th, 2023
Attention is the stuff of care. It is also, as Mary Oliver famously wrote, "the beginning of devotion." Writers and thinkers throughout the long twentieth century have explored attention's relationship to ethical questions of goodness, love and justice. The intensification of attention capture technologies add new urgency to these ageless inquiries. What role does attention play in our understanding of an ethical world? What is a "sanctuary" of attention? Where do these spaces already exist? How might we create them ourselves?
This course will review attention's role in efforts to create a more just and compassionate world. By examining activist movements through the lens of attentional practice, we will consider how attention can reconfigure our understanding of "activism." We will read texts by Simone Weil, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Wynter, and Jenny Odell, among others.These inquiries will be activated in our culminating Attention Lab on November 18th, at which we will seek to create a "sanctuary" space for ourselves and our community.
Co-taught by Kristin Lawler, Jeff Dolven, and Len Nalencz
Classes on Wednesdays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Nov. 1st - Nov. 15th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
The course will culminate in a public, free Attention Lab:
12:00 - 3:00pm
Saturday, Nov. 18th,
The Attention Economy: History, Theory, Resistance
Oct. 4th - Oct. 21st, 2023
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 — with troubling implications for social, political, and individual existence. New networks of data collection, and new (and newly intimate) technologies of access now work continuously to tap the human subject for the most fleeting traces of our attention, since each glance can now be priced, and the aggregate buying and selling of our mind-time and eye-life is the core driver of a vast new economy — the so-called "Attention Economy."
In this course, we will survey the historical context for the emergence of the Attention Economy from the advent of advertising in the mid-twentieth to the present moment. We'll explore the theoretical and political implications of the monetization of attention, and survey contemporary strategies to reclaim our attention, both individually and collectively. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how might we resist them?
Co-taught by Sonali Chakravarti, D. Graham Burnett, and Jac Mullen
Classes on Wednesdays, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Oct. 4th - Oct 18th
138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn
The course will culminate in a public, free Attention Lab:
12:00 - 3:00pm
Saturday, Oct. 21st,