Ecologies of Attention: Sensing at the Edge

How do we attend to the world, and how are the terms of that attention already shaped for us? Bringing together artists, curators, film theorists, and art historians, Ecologies of Attention: Sensing at the Edge reflects on attention as both a cognitive faculty or a scarce resource, and an aesthetic, embodied, and ecological condition. With a particular attentiveness to voices shaped across and in relation to the Asia Pacific, the symposium considers how perception is formed through social, technical, and sensorial environments, and how art might open other ways of noticing and sensing.

If attention is so often described in the language of crisis – fragmented, captured, exhausted – this programme lingers with its textures and atmospheres. It asks what becomes possible when we move away from an understanding of attention governed by extraction, productivity, and competition, toward what Yves Citton has called an ‘ecology of attention’. A way of thinking that situates perception as diffused and inseparable from the worlds that compose it.

This symposium gathers practices that remain close to the unstable edges of perception – between visibility and opacity, signal and sensation, intuition and analysis, the human and the more-than-human. It invites forms of aesthetic practice that dwell within mediation while also straining against its limits. These practices register ecological entanglement, embodied knowledge, cosmological thought, and the shifting conditions through which images, environments, and narratives come to be felt.

What kinds of receptivity might be cultivated within a culture of distraction? What forms of attunement and sensory relation emerge when perception is approached as exposure and as something shaped with and by others? How might moving image, performance, and curatorial practice reorient the sensible, making space for quieter forms of encounter and for ways of sensing that exceed the immediately knowable?

Across presentations, discussions, performance, and screenings, Ecologies of Attention invites attention to be thought otherwise: shifting away from a mode of capture towards a practice of relation.

Convened by Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at the Courtauld Institute; Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director at Asymmetry; Dr Yayu Zheng, Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute; and Jessica Kwok, Head of Programmes and Curatorial at Asymmetry.