We live in times dominated by a new medium that demands new forms of interaction and communication. A medium that imposes such accelerated rhythms that it hardly leaves us room to breathe, digest or reflect. It seems, that in this scenario, absurdity has become the maxim that moves us, and that only those who take it to the extreme, attracting the greatest number of looks and ears to their discourses, will have the opportunity to influence the behavior of the social body.
Attention has become a valuable asset because it can be captured, measured, and profiled, and then used to target and trigger specific behaviors in us. I harvested my own attention, so you can buy it, in an alluring show designed to grab yours, with the final goal of being able to ask you a question:
Do you think it is possible to regain some agency over the flows of our own attention?
These are the rules that governed my actions during the performance. The diagram shows the same logic, but visually.
STEP 1) Sit in front of the paper, the computer and the black and red markers. Focus your attention on the first square delimited by the grid printed on the paper, and start the computer’s process: emit a “yes” or a “no”, randomly, every second.
STEP 2) If the computer says “yes”, paint the square you are focused on, using the black marker, and move to the next square (left to right, top to bottom). If the computer says “no”, just move to the next square. Repeat until you reach the end of the paper.
CONDITION A) If you lose your attention, stop the computer’s process, paint the next empty square with the red marker, and when you are ready to continue, restart the computer’s process, and repeat step 2.
CONDITION B) When you reach the end of the paper, repeat from step 1, until you complete the 24 papers.
My task consisted of following 86400 one-bit instructions, randomly generated by a computer at the speed of one instruction per second.
Using a marker on a sheet of paper, I had to paint or not, according to the orders emitted by the computer (yes or no), stopping as little as possible, for the time strictly necessary.
If I lost my attention during the process, I had to stop the instructions, paint using a red marker, and when I was ready to continue, start the instructions again.
The performance is presented as an experiment to test the limits of my own attention. The absurdity of the proposal, its design as a challenge, the narrative and the visual language chosen for the video, all combined, act as a playground to explore our understanding of human attention, its value and the role it plays in our current digital society.
