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.
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
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
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
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, helping participants identify the design and regulatory frameworks that have shaped the politics and topology of the New York Metropolitan Region, and how new proposed projects could contribute to the city’s evolution.
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: Adam Dimesh
Car(ry)ing Across: A Toolkit for Attentive Translation
Aug 14th - 28th, 2024
Translation is a practice of attention to the mystery at language's core: the gap between words and the things they signify, between one linguistic model of reality and another. When we translate, we confront the ways in which language structures power, meaning, and experience. Translation becomes a generative framework from which to understand the demands and tradeoffs of a globalized world.
This seminar will explore the attentional contours of translation across three sessions, dedicated to questions of ethics, aesthetics, and practice. In the first session, we will consider translation's role in shaping global geographies of "center" and "periphery," and the hierarchies of attention these linguistic cosmologies entail. In the second session, we will ponder the troubled link between the letter and the spirit of a text, viewing attention to each as a primordial translative choice.
In the final session, we will draw on previous conversations to stage our own translations of short literary texts. Participants may translate from a foreign language or a rare English form/dialect; bilingualism is not required. We will wrap up by discussing the practice of translation in relation to the rise of machine-mediated works: Do tech-based translation tools aid or hinder our capacity for translative attention? Can machines pay attention to literary texts? How might this all impact the future of translation—and of human translators themselves?
Taught by Argentine writer and translator Josefina Massot.
Classes on Wednesdays, 6:45 - 9:15pm
Aug 14th - 28th
55 Washington St, Ste 736
Dumbo, Brooklyn
Past Courses:
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,
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 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 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.
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.
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
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.