Catastrophe in the ‘real-world’ is just an image on the internet.
ATTENTION(S) is a venue in which chronically-online creative thinkers reflect critically on their recent experiences with the internet and meme cultures. Resisting the urge to see social media as only a trivial firehose of meaningless content, we choose to read meme culture also as a form of emergent collective circulation of ideas, sentiments, sensations, hysterias, and shared experiences—the cuneiform, hieroglyphs, or cave paintings of the 21st Century. The intellect of internet memes is in their lack of origin and authorship, in their always-already understood reception, in the way they reflected what we already collectively felt even before they emerged. The most viral images are those that unlock the most broadly-shared sensations.
Under the demands of the attention economy, the screen arrests our attention. It is the surface medium through which the moving image is channeled, a stage on which to witness an unending string of miracles and disasters, from which we can’t look away. In turn, our attention revolves around things that, at first glance, don’t seem to deserve it. ATTENTION(S) is a space for people to more deeply consider the cultural conditions around them, to devote time to reading a situation back to us, and articulate what we cannot ourselves manage to fully express or understand.
You tell us… Here, we pay ATTENTION(S).