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ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
Attention Lab: HOME
Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.
What kinds of attention make a home? In this Lab, we'll think about the relationship between attention, space, and the forms of togetherness that support human flourishing.
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ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
SPATIAL POLITICS (1/3)
On the spatial politics of the flash mob
From novel, to viral, to commercial, to cringe: the life cycle of the flash mob, an internet trend that got people off the internet to gather in physical space. Now, fifteen years past its cultural peak, we have enough distance to study the flash mob as a social phenomenon, organizing practice, and art form.
What can we understand about culture, virality, and public performance by tracking the history and transformation of the flash mob? From the proliferation of interventionist public performance art in the 20th century to the internet’s creation of “smart mobs” to the specific conditions of virality in the mid 2010s and its relationship to commercialism, we will begin to see flash mobs as an action with real cultural and social organizing potential.
We will also study the formal ingredients of the flash mob — instantaneous and often joyful synchronized behaviors performed briefly in a public space — and the way this mode of shared experience has been shaped by advances in technology. Together, we will think through the liberatory and resistance-oriented cultural potential that may be discovered in this form. Is it possible to reclaim this "viral" mode of gathering for something greater than likes and reshares?
Led by interdisciplinary theatre artist and educator Sheridan Merrick.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
October 15-29
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Morteza Akhnia
Sidewalk Study AUSTIN, TX: THE HAUNTED PATH
After an evening of ghost stories, Ichabod Crane rides home through the familiar woods of Sleepy Hollow. Every sound and shadow now seems charged with possibility. Is something following him, or have the stories changed the way he sees the path?
Reading a short passage from Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, we’ll walk through Pease Park after dusk and notice what happens when we bring a spooky story into a real landscape. We’ll follow the trees and Shoal Creek, then gather at The Tavern, an Austin bar with a ghost story of its own, to share what we noticed.
Text: Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Date: Thursday, October 15 at 7pm
Location: Pease Park, Austin, Texas
If you are interested in joining the Austin, TX mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study: WHAT IF WE’RE THE GHOSTS?
What if Mario never wanted any of this? One must imagine Mario as a happy plumber in the Mushroom Kingdom, tending to the pipes where the Piranha Plants live, exchanging neighbourly small talk with the Koopas, stopping for dinner at the castle of Princess Peach and her beloved husband Bowser.
Then one day some mysterious force possesses him and he goes on a rampage, smashing the neighbourhood, accusing his best friend of kidnapping his own wife. What if that mysterious force was us? What if we are the ghosts?
Text: James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, Alexander J. Zawacki’s “Glitches and ghosts: The digital uncanny in video games and creepypasta” & John Keats’ “This living hand, now warm and capable”
Date: Thursday, October 15 at 7pm
Location: Wonderville in Bushwick with Nicholas & Samvit
Sidewalk Study WASHINGTON, DC: ENCHANTED GROUNDS
In his sweeping survey of the rise of secularism, Charles Taylor reveals how the modern world has been drained of its spirits. But our supposedly disenchanted culture is still haunted by an older sense of the sacred that keeps leaking back, especially at threshold moments like birth and death. As we meander through the stones and bones of Oak Hill Cemetery, we’ll explore what it means to re-enchant our attention on hallowed grounds where the veil is thin and the self more porous.
Text: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age
Date: Friday, October 16 at 1pm
Location: Oak Hill Cemetery, DC
If you are interested in joining the Washington DC mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study CLEVELAND, OH: THE THING THAT DOESN'T LEAVE
In Beloved, the past is not a memory but a tenant. Using Morrison's novel, we'll look at what it means for history to refuse resolution — and what unresolved things, big and small, are quietly still living in the rooms we occupy.
Text: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Date: Sunday, October 18 at 2pm
Location: Cleveland Hts with Aditi & Rob
If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study: THAT WHICH CAME BEFORE
Most people are in the habit of thinking of ourselves as a distinct and atomized self existing as a single point in history. However, animist perspectives encourage a different understanding. Are our “selves” merely a function of personal experiences, familial histories and immediate ancestral lines, or is there something far more expansive, perhaps eternal, living through us? What becomes possible when we stretch beyond the “funnel vision” of the “modern Western individual,” rooting instead into the infinite ecology of life, death, and the living continuum between the two?
Text: Josh Schrei’s The Mythic Body: Underworld & The Ancestors (Transcription)
Date: Sunday, October 18 at 2pm
Location: Greenwood Cemetery with Shrin & Eleanor
Attention Lab: EDUCATOR LAB
Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.
Sidewalk Study ST. LOUIS, MO: “THE DEAD WERE JUST THAT: ORDINARY PEOPLE”
We don’t quite hunt ghosts the way we hunt, say, a deer or a duck, but the word “hunt” (so close to “haunt”) gets at the sharp edge of our determination to make the spirits around us visible, audible, knowable.
In “Advice for the Apparitionally Challenged: A Ghost (Hunter) Story,” a chapter in anthropologist Misty L. Bastian’s book, she attempts to engage a suspected haunt in her own home in an ethnographic interview. Along the way, she has to confront the ethics of pushing for answers from those who might not want to give them. Is our curiosity enough to justify the intrusion?
Text: Misty L. Bastian’s “Advice for the Apparitionally Challenged: A Ghost (Hunter) Story” (2023)
Date: Wednesday, October 21 at 6:30pm Central
Location: South City with Chris & Michelle
If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.
SPATIAL POLITICS (2/3)
On the spatial politics of the flash mob
From novel, to viral, to commercial, to cringe: the life cycle of the flash mob, an internet trend that got people off the internet to gather in physical space. Now, fifteen years past its cultural peak, we have enough distance to study the flash mob as a social phenomenon, organizing practice, and art form.
What can we understand about culture, virality, and public performance by tracking the history and transformation of the flash mob? From the proliferation of interventionist public performance art in the 20th century to the internet’s creation of “smart mobs” to the specific conditions of virality in the mid 2010s and its relationship to commercialism, we will begin to see flash mobs as an action with real cultural and social organizing potential.
We will also study the formal ingredients of the flash mob — instantaneous and often joyful synchronized behaviors performed briefly in a public space — and the way this mode of shared experience has been shaped by advances in technology. Together, we will think through the liberatory and resistance-oriented cultural potential that may be discovered in this form. Is it possible to reclaim this "viral" mode of gathering for something greater than likes and reshares?
Led by interdisciplinary theatre artist and educator Sheridan Merrick.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
October 15-29
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Morteza Akhnia
Sidewalk Study: A HELPFUL HAUNTING
Most environments carry multiple stories, the hard-to-detect ghosts of past uses. We rarely pause long enough, or know where to look, to notice these layers. Think: the seminary that outlasted the neighborhood built around it, the bustling library that used to be a women’s prison. How do physical traces of history shape how we read a place?
No spot in New York City represents the complex relationship between past and present like the High Line, that symbol of urban rehabilitation, branded gentrification, and post-industrial repair. Join us as we conjure the city's past through close attention to its present.
Text: Teju Cole’s Open City & Tiziana De Rogatis’ “The Metamorphosis of Time”
Date: Thursday, October 22 at 7pm
Location: The High Line with Miranda & Anha
Attention Lab: FEAR
Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.
Sidewalk Study CLEVELAND, OH: A CHAMBER, HAUNTED
Dickinson tells us we don't need a house to be haunted — we carry our own chambers with us. In this Study, we'll ask what walls we build around ourselves, what they're meant to keep out, and what meets us anyway, no matter how carefully we've sealed the room.
Text: Emily Dickinson's "One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted"
Date: Sunday, October 25 at 2pm
Location: Ohio City with Aditi & Rob
If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
SPATIAL POLITICS (3/3)
On the spatial politics of the flash mob
From novel, to viral, to commercial, to cringe: the life cycle of the flash mob, an internet trend that got people off the internet to gather in physical space. Now, fifteen years past its cultural peak, we have enough distance to study the flash mob as a social phenomenon, organizing practice, and art form.
What can we understand about culture, virality, and public performance by tracking the history and transformation of the flash mob? From the proliferation of interventionist public performance art in the 20th century to the internet’s creation of “smart mobs” to the specific conditions of virality in the mid 2010s and its relationship to commercialism, we will begin to see flash mobs as an action with real cultural and social organizing potential.
We will also study the formal ingredients of the flash mob — instantaneous and often joyful synchronized behaviors performed briefly in a public space — and the way this mode of shared experience has been shaped by advances in technology. Together, we will think through the liberatory and resistance-oriented cultural potential that may be discovered in this form. Is it possible to reclaim this "viral" mode of gathering for something greater than likes and reshares?
Led by interdisciplinary theatre artist and educator Sheridan Merrick.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
October 15-29
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Morteza Akhnia
The Dance of an Open Mind: Toni Morrison's Radical Attentions with Prof. Namwali Serpell
RSVP HERE!
Toni Morrison's contributions to literature and American culture are a case study in the powers of human attention: to the possibilities of language, to the complexity of love, and to the pain and beauty of our American inheritance. In this evening of close reading and discussion, we'll take a close look at one of Morrison's essays with novelist, critic, and scholar Prof. Namwali Serpell, author of On Morrison (Hogarth 2026). The close reading will be followed by a Q&A with Prof. Serpell on Morrison's work as a whole.
Namwali Serpell is a writer and a Professor of English at Harvard. She’s the author of three works of criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), Stranger Faces (2020), and On Morrison (2026), and two novels: The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022). She was born in Lusaka and she lives in New York City.
PASSAGES: On Morrison podcast.
Photo credit: Toni Morrison in her office at Random House (Jill Krementz)
Photo credit: Toni Morrison in her office at Random House (Jill Krementz)
Sidewalk Study WASHINGTON, DC: THE NAMES WE CARRY
In “The Spirit of Freedom” sculpture outside the African-American Civil War Museum, we see the ghosts of freedom fighters and their families gazing into the distant future with hopes of abolition and liberation. They, like the freed men & women of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, remind us that the dead are still trying to tell the living something, about the names we carry, about what it takes to seek justice and unshackle ourselves. What do we see and hear when we open our senses to the lessons of our ancestors? We’ll time travel through the historic U Street corridor and the newly re-opened African American Civil War Museum to learn what the past wants to impress upon us.
Text: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Date: Saturday, October 31 at 3pm
Location: UStreet, DC
If you are interested in joining the Washington DC mailing list, fill out this form.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
HOUSEWORK as WORLD-BUILDING (1/3)
On the reenchantment of invisible labor
Cook, clean, comfort, teach, repeat. Social reproduction is the engine of collective life and housework its most intimate geography. What we don’t attend to turns invisible, and both the labor of housework and those who perform it are frequent victims of this invisibility. In this course we will attend closely to often-marginalized domestic labor. We will do so from three distinct sociocultural vantage points: housework as world-building, as art practice, and as ritual.
Our time together will take us through the International Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, thinkers on the politics of care such as M.E. O’Brien and Mai’a Williams, the art practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mona Hatoum, and the contemplative work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Through discussion, attention practices, collaborative writing, and experimental performance art, we will explore historical and contemporary interventions into housework and investigate what rigorous attention might alchemize our daily labor into.
Students should come ready to examine the role of housework in their own lives with generous curiosity. Dirty dishes optional.
Led by feminist writer, researcher, and organizer Zafi Tate.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
November 4-18
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Opening night performance | Monobloc Harp by Dan Ortiz Leizman
Please join us for the opening reception and performance celebrating Haunted by Light, a group exhibition of photoreactive media that draw attention to forms of light as they delineate the limits of our vision and visibility. On view are cyanotypes, autoradiographs, and lumen photography, the ashes and “breath” of plants captured in glass sculptures, flashing diodes of digital images, and audiovisual environments for rituals of collective mourning.
In the opening performance, artist Dan Ortiz Leizman turns the seemingly mundane monobloc chair into a string instrument. The ephemeral sounds, or “apocalyptic folk music” navigating the nostalgia and personal memories imperceptibly marked on the chair, rub against its bone-white plastic skeleton that will outlast human lifetimes.
RSVP is free but strongly encouraged due to venue capacity. Light refreshments will be served.
Dan Ortiz Leizman is an artist, writer, and educator based in the DMV. Their work explores the intimacies of geopolitical conflict, furniture design, and experimental soundmaking. Dan lectures at the University of Maryland and Montgomery College, teaching courses in drawing, design, and sculpture. Dan holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Goucher College. Their interdisciplinary research in sound, furniture, and post-war culture has been recognized through various grants including an ArtsAMP Faculty Impact Grant, an ARHU Faculty Advancement Grant, and a Clarvit Faculty and Graduate Research Fellowship.Their work has been included in shows and festivals across the East Coast at venues including IA&A at Hillyer, SoundScene at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Maryland Art Place.
Image: Dan Ortiz Leizman playing the Monobloc Harp. Courtesy of the artist and photography by Elile Kebede (@insidethedarkroom_)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
HOUSEWORK as WORLD-BUILDING (2/3)
On the reenchantment of invisible labor
Cook, clean, comfort, teach, repeat. Social reproduction is the engine of collective life and housework its most intimate geography. What we don’t attend to turns invisible, and both the labor of housework and those who perform it are frequent victims of this invisibility. In this course we will attend closely to often-marginalized domestic labor. We will do so from three distinct sociocultural vantage points: housework as world-building, as art practice, and as ritual.
Our time together will take us through the International Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, thinkers on the politics of care such as M.E. O’Brien and Mai’a Williams, the art practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mona Hatoum, and the contemplative work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Through discussion, attention practices, collaborative writing, and experimental performance art, we will explore historical and contemporary interventions into housework and investigate what rigorous attention might alchemize our daily labor into.
Students should come ready to examine the role of housework in their own lives with generous curiosity. Dirty dishes optional.
Led by feminist writer, researcher, and organizer Zafi Tate.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
November 4-18
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Lecture & workshop | Atomic Politics and Cyanotypes with elin o’Hara slavick
Join artist and activist elin o’Hara slavick for a lecture on atomic politics followed by a hands-on cyanotype workshop. Elin will discuss her research on the sociopolitical and environmental impact of nuclear weapons and powerplants, which informed multiple publications on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, her work with the intergenerational artist collective SWANS (Slow War Against the Nuclear State), and photo-chemical drawings, cyanotypes, and autoradiographs visualizing the lasting trauma of nuclear tragedies. Later in the event, attendees will learn how to make their own cyanotypes—a slow-reacting printing technique that uses sunlight or UV light to create images of objects on photosensitive paper.
Artist bio
elin o’Hara slavick is a California-based artist, curator, critic, and activist who has exhibited her work internationally. She is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, After Hiroshima, Holding History In Our Hand for the 75th commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and Cameramouth, a chapbook of surrealist poetry. She was artist-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine, 2022-2025, the Huntington Research and Art Fellow at CalTech in Spring 2022, and served as the Professor of Visual Art, Theory and Practice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 27 years. She is currently teaching Photography at Sarah Lawrence College in Fall 2026 and is working on a book entitled Dark Archive.
Image: elin o’Hara slavick, Queen Anne’s lace, contaminated mushroom and mysterious circle, cyanotype. Courtesy of the artist
HOUSEWORK as WORLD-BUILDING (3/3)
On the reenchantment of invisible labor
Cook, clean, comfort, teach, repeat. Social reproduction is the engine of collective life and housework its most intimate geography. What we don’t attend to turns invisible, and both the labor of housework and those who perform it are frequent victims of this invisibility. In this course we will attend closely to often-marginalized domestic labor. We will do so from three distinct sociocultural vantage points: housework as world-building, as art practice, and as ritual.
Our time together will take us through the International Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, thinkers on the politics of care such as M.E. O’Brien and Mai’a Williams, the art practices of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mona Hatoum, and the contemplative work of Thich Nhat Hanh. Through discussion, attention practices, collaborative writing, and experimental performance art, we will explore historical and contemporary interventions into housework and investigate what rigorous attention might alchemize our daily labor into.
Students should come ready to examine the role of housework in their own lives with generous curiosity. Dirty dishes optional.
Led by feminist writer, researcher, and organizer Zafi Tate.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
November 4-18
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
![ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [IN PERSON] (1/3)](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/647e2e2c944dab371f654149/c20d28cb-1e12-4d82-8b75-79e5e97b83fb/Untitled%252Bdesign.png)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [IN PERSON] (1/3)
Our flagship course on the attention crisis and collective action
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Please note: this is an IN-PERSON section of our course.
Mondays, 6:30-8:15pm
November 30th-December 14th
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: Pewter Chalice (1935–1942) by James H.C. Vail. Original from The National Galley of Art.
THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE (1/3)
ENROLL HERE!
A closer look into miniature worlds
There is an invisible world awaiting our attention: the world of the very small.
In this course, we will take a closer look at everyday objects through microscopes and macro lenses to bear witness to a surprisingly structured world only non-humans can ordinarily see. We will explore the anatomy of plants, the mouths they breathe through (stomata), and the architecture they construct for pollinators. We will look at humanmade objects and notice how color, texture, and the felt sense of our surroundings change with scale. We will view the rich ecosystem of a drop of pond water and see life forms ranging from the monstrous to the surprisingly cute.
Our discussions and reflections will take us through the aesthetics of Kobayashi Issa, Voltaire’s science fiction, the relational ecology of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the investigative wonder of Annie Dillard, and more.
By the end of this seminar, our attention to detail in the marginal and mundane will expand and widen the possibilities of our vision. We will leave with the ability to shift the scale of our attention and deepen our capacity to notice (and enter) these ever-present infinitesimal worlds.
Led by Renee Bell, assistant professor of mathematics at Lehman College.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
December 1st-15th
Workshop | Embodied Threads with Cinthya Santos-Briones
Join SoRA for Embodied Threads, a political embroidery workshop led by artist and educator Cinthya Santos-Briones where we work with materials drawn from media outlets and press archives to create textile maps connecting words, events, territories, and migrant experiences.
Embroidery circles have traditionally functioned as spaces for storytelling and healing, especially amongst communities of women as well as Latin American textile practices such as Chilean arpilleras and Bordados por la Paz in Mexico. In contrast to the speed of the news cycle in our age where information constantly appears, circulates, and disappears from our screens, embroidery proposes a different temporality: it invites us to pause, observe, and reread. By bringing these fragments of information onto a textile surface, what is often ephemeral and abstract acquires permanence and becomes a material trace of the discourses, policies, and forms of violence that shape our time.
Materials will be provided. No prior knowledge of embroidery is necessary to participate.
Cinthya Santos-Briones is an interdisciplinary artist, visual researcher, and educator of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York. Her practice explores migration, memory, spirituality, and resistance from a decolonial feminist perspective, using photography, archival research, text, and community-based textile practices. With a background in ethnohistory and anthropology, she worked for a decade at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), researching Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine. Her projects have received support from Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Women, the Mellon Foundation, Wave Hill, NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, BRIC, and El Museo del Barrio.
Image: Courtesy of the artist and photography by Parker Thomas-Hamlin
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [IN PERSON] (2/3)
Our flagship course on the attention crisis and collective action
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Please note: this is an IN-PERSON section of our course.
Mondays, 6:30-8:15pm
November 30th-December 14th
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: Pewter Chalice (1935–1942) by James H.C. Vail. Original from The National Galley of Art.
THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE (2/3)
A closer look into miniature worlds
There is an invisible world awaiting our attention: the world of the very small.
In this course, we will take a closer look at everyday objects through microscopes and macro lenses to bear witness to a surprisingly structured world only non-humans can ordinarily see. We will explore the anatomy of plants, the mouths they breathe through (stomata), and the architecture they construct for pollinators. We will look at humanmade objects and notice how color, texture, and the felt sense of our surroundings change with scale. We will view the rich ecosystem of a drop of pond water and see life forms ranging from the monstrous to the surprisingly cute.
Our discussions and reflections will take us through the aesthetics of Kobayashi Issa, Voltaire’s science fiction, the relational ecology of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the investigative wonder of Annie Dillard, and more.
By the end of this seminar, our attention to detail in the marginal and mundane will expand and widen the possibilities of our vision. We will leave with the ability to shift the scale of our attention and deepen our capacity to notice (and enter) these ever-present infinitesimal worlds.
Led by Renee Bell, assistant professor of mathematics at Lehman College.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
December 1st-15th
Screening & workshop | Odes to Death with Leigh Davis
Join artist Leigh Davis for a screening of short videos followed by an invitation to explore singing practice as a ritual for collective mourning. This event both activates Leigh’s installation at SoRA and extends the spirit of her ongoing public activations, such as Karaoke in the Cemetery, recently installed at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a platform for participants to express and share in grief responses through song.
Leigh Davis (Brooklyn, NY & Washington, D.C.) creates interdisciplinary work to explore elements of mourning and the spaces we embody in bereavement. Through a combination of artistic inquiry, hands-on engagement, and training in end-of-life practices, her projects aim to reveal grief as a form of lived knowledge: both deeply personal and profoundly collective. Her filmic essay Inquiry into the ELE was exhibited at BRIC Contemporary Art (Brooklyn) and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), and site-based installation Vigil and Feeling Tones was featured at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn). Her ongoing project Karaoke in the Cemetery brings karaoke to cemeteries across the country, creating a platform for participants to express grief through singing together. Leigh has also exhibited at Open Source (Brooklyn), EFA Project Space (New York), Oliver Art Center (Oakland), and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia).
Image: Leigh Davis, Karaoke in the Cemetery/A Night of Grief Karaoke, The Woodlands, Philadelphia, PA, September 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [IN PERSON] (3/3)
Our flagship course on the attention crisis and collective action
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Anna Tsing, Natasha Dow Schull, Shoshanna Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Jonathan Crary, among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Please note: this is an IN-PERSON section of our course.
Mondays, 6:30-8:15pm
November 30th-December 14th
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: Pewter Chalice (1935–1942) by James H.C. Vail. Original from The National Galley of Art.
THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE (3/3)
A closer look into miniature worlds
There is an invisible world awaiting our attention: the world of the very small.
In this course, we will take a closer look at everyday objects through microscopes and macro lenses to bear witness to a surprisingly structured world only non-humans can ordinarily see. We will explore the anatomy of plants, the mouths they breathe through (stomata), and the architecture they construct for pollinators. We will look at humanmade objects and notice how color, texture, and the felt sense of our surroundings change with scale. We will view the rich ecosystem of a drop of pond water and see life forms ranging from the monstrous to the surprisingly cute.
Our discussions and reflections will take us through the aesthetics of Kobayashi Issa, Voltaire’s science fiction, the relational ecology of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the investigative wonder of Annie Dillard, and more.
By the end of this seminar, our attention to detail in the marginal and mundane will expand and widen the possibilities of our vision. We will leave with the ability to shift the scale of our attention and deepen our capacity to notice (and enter) these ever-present infinitesimal worlds.
Led by Renee Bell, assistant professor of mathematics at Lehman College.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
December 1st-15th
Sidewalk Study: DIASPORIC HAUNT
Hauntings take many forms. Drawing upon the work of Akbar Abbas and Ocean Vuong, this Study asks how we can locate ourselves when our relationships to land and memory are constantly changing. How do we relate to a place when it is constantly being remade by colonial power, economic flows, and cultural pressures? How does this ongoing dislocation change the identity of people and of peoples?
Join us as we explore these questions in one of our city’s most mercurial neighborhoods. How do we know ourselves and the places we call home when we are also grieving and yearning for a motherland, people, and time that no longer exists? What if the history that haunts us never existed at all?
Text: Akbar Abbas’ Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance & Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Date: Monday, October 12 at 7pm
Location: Chinatown?? Lower East Side?? Dimes Square?? with Katie & Cherilyn
PUNK CODING (3/3)
On using the attention frackers’ tools against them
For thirty years, customizing your interface to the internet meant knowing how to write code, and the people who designed the UX and algorithms that define social media feeds had the only vote that counted. Now, through "vibe coding," someone with no engineering background can put a working tool into the world in an afternoon. What opportunities does this shift present? Is the early-web dream of “fixing the internet” now feasible? How wary should we be of these tools, seeing as they are constructed by the attention frackers themselves?
We will read across the media thinkers who saw this coming, from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman through Zeynep Tufekci, and we take up Jaron Lanier's argument for data dignity alongside the current case for federated social media and middleware.
We will also build. As a group, we’ll construct wrappers around the most exploitative platforms we use: interfaces that replace the algorithmic Skinner box of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube with something that empowers us with more intentional choice. As we do so, we will critically examine the quandary of using the master’s tools on the master’s house. Culture jamming has always worked on borrowed infrastructure, and the infrastructure has never been this borrowable (though we might break some terms of service)!
No coding experience required. That is the whole point.
Led by Brian Rosen, longtime Pixar technologist and now a research scientist at Google X, The Moonshot Factory.
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Andre Moura
Book talk & Attention Lab in Columbus, Mississippi
SoRA is heading to Columbus, Mississippi!
On Monday, October 12, we’re excited to join Friendly City Books for an afternoon of conversation and practice. From 1:00pm -3:30pm, we’ll gather for a book talk and Attention Lab, exploring the ideas and practices at the heart of Attensity!. Everyone who joins us will receive a free copy of Attensity!. See you there.
RSVP required — spots are limited
Email info@friendlycitybooks.com to reserve your spot.
Attention Lab: WORLDBUILDING
Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.
We're living through a crisis of imagination: We need new visions for the future that we want to move towards (rather than the dystopias we want to avoid). In this Lab, we'll investigate the worldbuilding powers of human attention.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
RADICAL TRASH STUDIES (3/3)
On the social construction of trash
If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?
This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.
The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.
Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 22-October 6
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Kai Pro
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
Sidewalk Study: LIFE & DEATH
Ghosts are ancestral spirits. In this Study, we’ll question the linearity of time and see what kinds of rhythms, what kinds of spaces, and what kinds of encounters are possible when we understand time as a spiral.
How do we learn to live on a "damaged planet”? What changes when we shift our understanding and experience of time from its linear model to “spiral time?” Meet us in Central Park's Seneca Village to attend to our human experience and environmental traces of the obscured past. What ghosts are already around us, waiting to be seen?
Text: Tsing et. al’s Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet & Leda Maria Martins’ Performances in Spiral Time
Date: Monday, October 5 at 7pm
Location: Seneca Village in Central Park with Lindsee & Connor
PUNK CODING (2/3)
On using the attention frackers’ tools against them
For thirty years, customizing your interface to the internet meant knowing how to write code, and the people who designed the UX and algorithms that define social media feeds had the only vote that counted. Now, through "vibe coding," someone with no engineering background can put a working tool into the world in an afternoon. What opportunities does this shift present? Is the early-web dream of “fixing the internet” now feasible? How wary should we be of these tools, seeing as they are constructed by the attention frackers themselves?
We will read across the media thinkers who saw this coming, from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman through Zeynep Tufekci, and we take up Jaron Lanier's argument for data dignity alongside the current case for federated social media and middleware.
We will also build. As a group, we’ll construct wrappers around the most exploitative platforms we use: interfaces that replace the algorithmic Skinner box of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube with something that empowers us with more intentional choice. As we do so, we will critically examine the quandary of using the master’s tools on the master’s house. Culture jamming has always worked on borrowed infrastructure, and the infrastructure has never been this borrowable (though we might break some terms of service)!
No coding experience required. That is the whole point.
Led by Brian Rosen, longtime Pixar technologist and now a research scientist at Google X, The Moonshot Factory.
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Andre Moura
Sidewalk Study ST. LOUIS, MO: INTERTWINE
“Bardo” is a Tibetan word describing a gap between any two conditions, an intermediate state. Although usually associated with the spiritual plane, there are so many middle grounds in everyday life. At the Artica festival, we experience art in a flood plain shaded by the skeletons of industry, surrounded by ghosts that haven’t moved on.
Tales of ghosts and possessions usually conjure spooky or frightening feelings. But what if those existing in the gap between states craved connection and care as much as the living? What would it mean to possess and be possessed? In the bardo along the river, will you be possessor, or possessed?
Text: George Saunders’ “Lincoln In The Bardo” (2017)
Date: Saturday, October 3 at 2pm Central
Location: Artica Festival DIY Stage in St. Louis with Chris and Michelle
If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.
Attention Lab: FASHION
Attention Lab workshops are collective participatory experiments in the powers of human attention. Through group practices and guided discussions, we seek to understand what attention is, what it can do, and why it's worth protecting.
Everybody is an attention artist; all it takes is putting on clothes. In this Lab, we'll play with the relationship between style, presentation, and public space.
EYE-CATCH! Fashion Exhibition Opening
Join SoRA for the opening of our fall exhibition, EYE-CATCH! (October 1-30), presenting wearable pieces by Jianing Zhao, Nathalie San Fratello, Tanner Kok, Lexi Fujita, Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, and Kajal Ramrup that confront the monetization of attention in fashion. Visitors can enjoy a full video documentation of the fashion show on September 19 that showcased twenty looks in total from the designers, and observe the color, structure, and texture of selected pieces in close proximity. A collection of upcycled SoRA merch, screen-printed by Francesca Barr, will be available only for the night.
With a majority of the pieces constructed from secondhand or upcycled materials, EYE-CATCH! reaffirms that resistance to the commodification of our attention begins with our most intimate surroundings — by attending to the deep pasts, and possible futures embedded in the ways we clothe ourselves.
This is a free event. Light refreshments will be provided.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
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. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. 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 are communities of activists already working to resist them?
SEEING, DRAWING, UNSEEING (3/3)
On figure drawing as a mode of attention
Drawing isn't simply a language of representation; it's also a way of paying attention.
Through sustained observation and a series of practical exercises, we will explore how drawing can interrupt familiar ways of seeing and make room for a slower, more attentive, and more intuitive engagement with the world. Drawing allows us to look before we judge or interpret.
The course will focus especially on figure drawing and its complex relationship with the body, with particular attention to the female body. The history of visual representation is also a history of power: who is allowed to look, who becomes the object of the gaze, and how bodies are made visible—or reduced to objects. By examining the act of looking itself, we will consider whether drawing can help us question some of these inherited habits and develop a different relationship with the body.
The seminar combines practical exercises with critical reflection. Its aim is not simply to produce a successful image, but to use drawing as a way of asking how we see, what we have been taught to see, and how we might begin to see differently.
Led by architect and educator Olímpia Solà Inaraja.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 16-30
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: Study of Angel's Hand for "Mercy's Dream" (1857) by Daniel Huntington. Original from The Smithsonian.
Sidewalk Study: STROLLING in STYLE
In 1920s Harlem, the “stroll” — a slow, deliberate procession of self-display — was meant to announce one’s arrival and presence within the community. Denied access to indoor space, Black New Yorkers turned city streets into stages, each outfit and gait a declaration of dignity in a city designed to deny it. What began as “defiant performances of freedom, dignity, self-worth, and cultural syncretism” over time became less a performance for the white gaze than a gift exchanged within the community.
Join us on the once-strolled streets of Harlem to trace the politics of dandyism, Black aesthetic modernism, and how walking, watching, and being seen could constitute a culture. Perhaps we may once again make the sidewalk sanctified ground…
Text: Monica L. Miller’s Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
Date: Tuesday, September 29 at 7pm
Location: Harlem with Lindsee & Katie
RADICAL TRASH STUDIES (2/3)
On the social construction of trash
If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?
This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.
The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.
Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 22-October 6
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Kai Pro
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
PUNK CODING (1/3)
On using the attention frackers’ tools against them
For thirty years, customizing your interface to the internet meant knowing how to write code, and the people who designed the UX and algorithms that define social media feeds had the only vote that counted. Now, through "vibe coding," someone with no engineering background can put a working tool into the world in an afternoon. What opportunities does this shift present? Is the early-web dream of “fixing the internet” now feasible? How wary should we be of these tools, seeing as they are constructed by the attention frackers themselves?
We will read across the media thinkers who saw this coming, from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman through Zeynep Tufekci, and we take up Jaron Lanier's argument for data dignity alongside the current case for federated social media and middleware.
We will also build. As a group, we’ll construct wrappers around the most exploitative platforms we use: interfaces that replace the algorithmic Skinner box of platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube with something that empowers us with more intentional choice. As we do so, we will critically examine the quandary of using the master’s tools on the master’s house. Culture jamming has always worked on borrowed infrastructure, and the infrastructure has never been this borrowable (though we might break some terms of service)!
No coding experience required. That is the whole point.
Led by Brian Rosen, longtime Pixar technologist and now a research scientist at Google X, The Moonshot Factory.
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Andre Moura
Sidewalk Study AUSTIN, TX: WAYS OF REMAINING
Ghosts have always unsettled the boundary between the living and the dead, the material and the unseen. In “The Future of Ghosts,” Jeanette Winterson asks what happens when digital worlds make those boundaries less certain. If we can meet as avatars, inhabit spaces without our bodies, and continue interacting with versions of people after they die, what makes a ghost a ghost?
This Study will consider how technology might change our sense of presence, absence, and being alive. We’ll bring Winterson’s questions into the Texas State Cemetery, a place where death is marked in stone and remembered through the physical world, then gather at Radio Rosewood over coffee for conversation.
Text: Jeanette Winterson’s “The Future of Ghosts”
Date: Wednesday, October 25 at 11am
Location: Plaza Saltillo, Austin, Texas
If you are interested in joining the Austin, TX mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study AUSTIN, TX: EYE FOR STYLE
Long before Bill Cunningham became famous for photographing street style in New York, he was already an obsessive student of how people dress. A milliner, collector, and lifelong observer, Cunningham delighted in the unexpected combinations, small details, and personal inventions through which people made fashion their own.
Taking inspiration from Cunningham’s joyful and idiosyncratic way of seeing, we’ll turn the Guadalupe Vintage Market into a field of observation. Among its racks, objects, and outfits, we’ll practice noticing what makes something stylish, surprising, peculiar, beautiful, or entirely its own. Perhaps personal style begins not with knowing what to wear, but with learning how to look.
Text: Bill Cunningham’s Fashion Climbing: A Memoir with Photographs
Date: Sunday, September 27, 2026
Location: Guadalupe Vintage Market, Austin
If you are interested in joining the Austin, TX mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study WASHINGTON, DC: FITFUL TRACINGS
Text: Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror
Date: Sunday, September 27
Location: CityCenter, DC
If you are interested in joining the Washington DC mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study CLEVELAND, OH: Social Currency
We move through the world dressed — every day, without much thought, we make dozens of small decisions about how visible we want to be. What to wear on top, what to leave off, what to match and what to let clash. Most of these choices happen so automatically we don't register them as choices at all.
Georg Simmel, writing in 1904, noticed something quietly radical about this: clothing isn't just self-expression. It's a way of managing attention itself — how much of it we want, how much we can bear, and where the line falls between disappearing into a crowd and standing apart from it. He wrote that following convention makes us invisible — "its acceptance by any one individual does not call attention to him" — while even a small departure from it is "immediately noticed." Attention, in other words, isn't something that just happens to us. We're constantly, quietly negotiating for it, or negotiating our way out of it
Text: FASHION, Georg Simmel 1904
Date: Sunday, September 27 at 2pm
Location: Ames Family Atrium at the Cleveland Museum of Art with Aditi & Rob
If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study: OH, TO BE CLOTHED!
We take for granted the practice of clothing our bodies, and most attempts to theorize this practice emerge from social science, psychology, or marketing research. But what if those shoes want to be on your feet as much as you want to wear them? What if our clothing “choices” convey less a decision that is made by us, and rather a relationship that unfolds between us and our garments?
Looking through the lens of Affect Studies (or "non-representational theory”), this Study will consider how identity is affected (!) when we include clothing in the “assemblage” of our bodies.
Text: By Lucia Ruggerone’s The Feeling of Being Dressed: Affect Studies and the Clothed Body
Date: Saturday, September 26, 2026
Location: Chelsea with Miranda & Eleanor
Sidewalk Study ST. LOUIS, MO: “A FAVOURITE DRESS”
Mrs. Dalloway’s poignant reflection on middle age, interior worlds, and mental health has had staying power for more than a century. We follow a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party and reflects on the choices she’s made . . . and the ones she’s let drift too far from her.
Choosing to mend “a favourite dress” to wear to the party becomes an act of reflection and care but one that’s also marked by distraction and insecurity. What can be fixed and who can fix it? What is better left unmended and unexamined?
Text: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Date: Thursday, September 24 at 6:30pm Central
Location: South City with Chris and Michelle
If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study ST. LOUIS, MO: “THE DEAD WERE JUST THAT: ORDINARY PEOPLE”
We don’t quite hunt ghosts the way we hunt, say, a deer or a duck, but the word “hunt” (so close to “haunt”) gets at the sharp edge of our determination to make the spirits around us visible, audible, knowable.
In “Advice for the Apparitionally Challenged: A Ghost (Hunter) Story,” a chapter in anthropologist Misty L. Bastian’s book, she attempts to engage a suspected haunt in her own home in an ethnographic interview. Along the way, she has to confront the ethics of pushing for answers from those who might not want to give them. Is our curiosity enough to justify the intrusion?
Text: Misty L. Bastian’s “Advice for the Apparitionally Challenged: A Ghost (Hunter) Story” (2023)
Date: Wednesday, October 21 at 6:30pm Central
Location: South City with Chris and Michelle
If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.
SEEING, DRAWING, UNSEEING (2/3)
On figure drawing as a mode of attention
Drawing isn't simply a language of representation; it's also a way of paying attention.
Through sustained observation and a series of practical exercises, we will explore how drawing can interrupt familiar ways of seeing and make room for a slower, more attentive, and more intuitive engagement with the world. Drawing allows us to look before we judge or interpret.
The course will focus especially on figure drawing and its complex relationship with the body, with particular attention to the female body. The history of visual representation is also a history of power: who is allowed to look, who becomes the object of the gaze, and how bodies are made visible—or reduced to objects. By examining the act of looking itself, we will consider whether drawing can help us question some of these inherited habits and develop a different relationship with the body.
The seminar combines practical exercises with critical reflection. Its aim is not simply to produce a successful image, but to use drawing as a way of asking how we see, what we have been taught to see, and how we might begin to see differently.
Led by architect and educator Olímpia Solà Inaraja.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 16-30
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: Study of Angel's Hand for "Mercy's Dream" (1857) by Daniel Huntington. Original from The Smithsonian.
Sidewalk Study: The COOL
The concept of ‘cool’ is foundational to contemporary fashion and one of America’s great cultural signifiers. Coolness also, according to the scholar Robert Farris Thompson, arrived in America from related concepts in many cultures across West Africa and the African diaspora. What kinds of decisions do people make to seek out this ever-elusive ideal? What exactly does coolness communicate? Where does the concept even come from?
In this study we’ll examine how taking an Afro-diasporic view of coolness can help us understand how cool people present themselves, why so many people want to be cool, and how coolness can be understood as “a symbolically generous aesthetic organization of social reality”.
Text: Robert Farris Thompson’s “An Introduction to Transatlantic Black Art History”
Date: Saturday, September 26 @ 2pm
Location: Chelsea with Nicholas & Connor
RADICAL TRASH STUDIES (1/3)
On the social construction of trash
If you place attention on something, does it stop being trash? Is there waste only where there's no attention?
This seminar takes that question and gets our hands dirty with it. Drawing on geographer Vinay Gidwani's work on India's "waste-value dialectic," alongside artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Artist and its insistence that unseen labor deserves witness, we'll build our own practice of sustained, unglamorous noticing. Students will keep a waste log, transform a piece of their own discarded material by hand into dye, into stock, and into structure. We'll close the course with a group exhibition built entirely from what got reclaimed.
The seminar also draws on fieldwork from Bangalore's construction-waste economy (Baka, Doherty, Butt) and returns often to Dante, whose Inferno remains one of literature's oldest arguments that waste is a location, not a substance. We will ask: is there really an “away” to throw things to? By the end, we will have a richer, more flexible and personal relationship to what we discard.
Led by Shivani Lakshmi Aysola, founding principal of Shamba-la Studios and author of Dialectics of Debris, a study of Bangalore's construction waste landscape.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
September 22-October 6
Our courses cost $250, with a Supporter rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Supported rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo by Kai Pro
Sidewalk Study SILICON VALLEY, CA : The Secret Life of Color
Where does color come from? In her 2016 book The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair deepens our understanding of color by delving into the histories of dozens of pigments and dyes. Through her detailed research, St. Clair reminds us not to take color for granted, revealing the surprisingly arduous means by which colors– such as Ultramarine blue and Tyrian Purple– were originally sourced, and how these hues come to hold meaning. We’ll be following St. Clair’s lead as we consider through the lens of science, myth, and history in downtown Menlo Park.
Text: The Secret Lives of Color Kassia St. Clair
Date: September 22nd, 6 PM-8 PM
Location: Fremont Park, Menlo Park CA
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EYE-CATCH! Fashion Show
Please join SoRA our inaugural fashion show featuring wearable pieces by Jianing Zhao, Nathalie San Fratello, Tanner Kok, Lexi Fujita, and Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, winning stylists from the School’s EYE-CATCH! open call. Each stylist will showcase four looks inspired by the aesthetics and counter-aesthetics of the Attention Economy, brought to life by twenty models as our Dumbo Sanctuary transforms into a runway.
In addition to the runway, the fashion show will invite audiences to an attentional score designed in conversation with sartorial traditions, to be activated by audience members during the fashion show. The runway will be followed by an afterparty with light refreshments and DJ set by Simisola. Limited-edition upcycled merch with screen printed designs and a digicam photo zone will be open throughout the evening to enjoy!
Please note that if you arrive after 6:20pm, the doors will close in order to minimize disruption during the runway. If you arrive late, please text us at (646) 526-9412.
The audience area during the runway will be a mixture of seating and standing, assigned on a first-come first-serve basis. If you have accessibility concerns, please feel free to email us at strotherschool@sustainedattention.net and we will accommodate you.