Attention practices
Fodder for experiments in attention and artmaking
Attention practices
Or, as Nietzsche put it in an aphorism cited by Oppezzo and Schwartz, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
I wouldn’t go so far, but the spirit of the sentiment seems true enough. I’ve lately heard a great deal about how writing is a form of thinking. There is a stronger sense in which one could take that claim, but it at least means... See more
I wouldn’t go so far, but the spirit of the sentiment seems true enough. I’ve lately heard a great deal about how writing is a form of thinking. There is a stronger sense in which one could take that claim, but it at least means... See more
The Ambling Mind
“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place ... See more
The Matter With Things Quotes by Iain McGilchrist
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others” Proust
But for me, as a person for whom narrow focus is against my instincts, the most remarkable thing about it is how rich it feels. My life these days is small and boring. I bicycle across the same fields every day, I notice how the wind turbines turn to face the wind, I rarely travel, and I spend my spare time staring at a Word document. Annie Dillard... See more
Henrik Karlsson • Almost Everyone I’ve Met Would Be Well-Served Thinking More About What to Focus On
How to priority-stack ideas that are still vague? Right now, I am just apportioning a bit of time to pursue this, a bit of time to that, and making progress on none of them.
“an art work is neither a physical thing nor a viewer’s mental image of it but something in between, created in attentive space”
The Battle for Attention
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/the-battle-for-attention
via Instapaper
The Battle for Attention
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/the-battle-for-attention
via Instapaper
I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same... See more
Rayne Fisher-Quann • Choosing to Walk
