Materializing Attention Topologies

Outline:

Visualization and Analysis of Spatial (Body-Environment) Communication – towards an empirical, material, hybrid reception aesthetics – towards a processual materialism of the world-person relation

AIM

The goal of this project is to research, sketch, build and test methodology for comprehensively registering and annotating attention topologies as ground-zero of the person-world encounter and first earnest of how anything comes to matter.

My dissertation pursued the general goal of shaping an empirical aesthetics to better support the study of experimental literary and intermedial (visual-verbal) production by tracking and visualizing the movement of visual attention in acts of reading. Since then I have also pursued the specific goal of understanding and studying the “procedural architecture” of Arakawa and Gins. This proposal extends those aims into a transdisciplinary project to develop methodologies of attention-based, intermodal tracking and visualization of full-spectrum perceptual/reception events in the empirical, full-bodied, social, human experience of subjects encountering designed environments, exhibitions or objects. The goal is to produce concepts and tools for more constructively impacting prevailing discourses with the insights from experimental fields.

Most importantly, this project aims to materialize a philosophy of relationality capable of reorienting knowledge practices and cultural production, incl. in architecture, exhibition practice and the Digital Humanities.

SIGNIFICANCE

In view of the claims, goals or promises made for a given object, architecture, environment or institution – as to what they can, will or do do as cultural productions – there must be a way to discern and determine (without foreclosing on) the phenomena of experience that result and of tracking and analysing these as impact. What matters institutionally (financially) is a quantifiable, objective value pursued indirectly through the production of a value generally thought of as subjective. The study of aesthetic effects (patterns of attention are among other things aesthetic effects) might seem like a nostalgic indulgence in 18th C. art theory, but, properly seen, the failure to conduct such study would instead represent a gross negligence in thinking about cultural production, where potentially huge flows of capital and material resources can effectively be yoked to promises of immaterial resource and value flow whose production or delivery can seemingly never be truly proven or denied. Mystifying the aesthetic by denying it the focus artificially decouples these layers of value production, ensuring dominance of the former (capital driven) in the real world. Materializing the aesthetic makes relationality real and establishes responsibility between person, world and vice versa. Not aesthetics, empirical/embodied/embedded aesthetics. Not aesthetics but a materialism of human-world enmeshment that will enable us, further than before, to know and say what is going on.

RELEVANT RESEARCH

Attention

A foundational text in the constitution of attention as an object for modern philosophy and psychology is William James’ chapter on attention in the Principles of Psychology (1900), from which we can trace a number of arcs around this epistemologically central yet elusive topic. One arc links James’ text with contemporary fronts in cognitive neuroscience that explore attention in their pursuit of a cognitive theory of consciousness, e.g Antonio Damasio, Bernard Baars, Raja Parasuraman. Important culminations in these lines emerge with the proponents of “enactive cognition” or “4E”, for embodied, embedded, enacted, and/or extended cognition.

Another arc links Paul Klee’s art-science of “the wandering viewpoint”, contemporaneous with James, with concepts in the reception aesthetics of Wolfang Iser’s The Act of Reading, preparing an attention-based analysis that very easily scales from painting or literature across to intermedial and intermodal dimensions of “readerly” behaviour.

Another arc looks at attention and the central role, and very different definition, it is given in the Abhidamma philosophical tradition, and in Vipassana (Goenka) and Zen (Dogen/Suzuki) meditation traditions.

Next we see how concepts and questions of attention have been framed in contemporary discourses on mediality, post-human consciousness and mental health, from Marshall McLuhan’s “extensions” of the senses to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and its resonances in the late age of the smartphone. An important touchpoint here is the current of investigation that flowed into Warren Neidich’s publication series on The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism and in the book, Cognitive Architecture edited by Neidich and Deborah Hauptmann.

From here we come to look at ventures in the testing and enhancement of attention, like the various Attention Training methods and services, as well as to the whole field of efforts at quantifying and exploiting knowledge of attention through methods of cognitive marketing, productized and productizing in software and analysis services like those of Eyetracking.com. The last of these arcs brings the broad scan full-circle, to a symptomatology of our late stage of capitalist society, with attention at the heart of its primary modes of production. Through an assembly of perspectives on attention, I hope to find productive, transdisciplinary modes of approach to the topic that can reveal its material role in processes of world-construction, knowledge production and culture.

Topology

Alan Prohm Dissertation (2004): Visual Poetics: Meaning Space from Mallarmé to Metalheart – Central to this study methodologically were topologies of readerly attention visualized on texts in the act of reading, yielding re-readable records of acts of construal key to both meaning and mattering.

Madeline Gins Architectural Body (2002): This work gave us the word “biotopology”, expanding Arakawa and Gins’ collaborative, transdisciplinary thinking around the concept of “landing sites”, as the distribution of areas of awareness in world-building.

Kurt Lewin: The topology of life space Lewin describes under the rubric of a “geometry of direction” in his hodological account of space and movement, corresponds compellingly with A+G’s proposition and yields valuable indications towards possible diagramming; cf. The Conceptual Representation and the Measurement of Psychological Forces (1938).

Leibniz: Leibniz, who contributed to the invention of topology as a way to go on with philosophy in an infinite and infinitesimal universe, also went beyond anyone before in materialising the mathematics of his cosmology. His unrealized Analysis Situ may be the hidden tap-root of A+G‘s Biotopology.

Pseudo-Quintillian: Part of the origin story of the awareness and use of topoi in inter-activity with attention, Quinitillian formalised practices of topologization persisting in traditions of rhetoric and philosophy through to Leibniz’s near predecessor, Giordano Bruno.

Edouard Glissant: countering European philosophies of loneliness and exclusion with one of lived relationality, Glissant surfaces the concept of “lieux communs” at a generality, dimensionality and granularity similar to that of A+G’s of “landing sites”, but with more specifically transcultural ambitions.

In previous publications (list below) I have argued the surpassing in A+G of phenomenology as a mode of analysis, enumerated the legacy of approaches in A+G‘s own diagramming, proposed the foundations of an adequate diagramming practice and listed resources from contemporary cognitive science for undergirding an account of the impacts and efficacies called on in A+G‘s theories of procedural architecture. All of this directly supports and prepares the research and prototype development this fellowship is undertaking.

“Constructing Poesis: Storyboards for an Immersive Diagramming”Inflexions: a Journal of Research Creation , no. 6: the Arakawa and Gins issue, Montreal, Jan. 2013

“Building Body – Two Treatments on Landing Site Theory”, in The Funambulist Papers: Vol. 2 Body ed. Léopold Lambert , Punctum Books, May 2015

“AttentionTracking.org”, web-based interface prototype (no longer online)

Visual Poetics: Meaning Space from Mallarmé to Metalheart
Doctoral Thesis in Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 2004.

“Attention Tracking: Some Empiricism for a Visual Poetics”, (from dissertation chapter on methodology for empirical analysis of visual/intermedial reading)

upcoming: Research Fellowship for fieldwork at sites of Arakawa and Gins’ procedural architecture in Japan – IJ Fellowship for Research on Japanese Art, 1-23.10.2024

Seminar: “Attention – interdisciplinary takes on an endangered resource – a seminar“, at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin – Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, bologna.lab, in the studies program Vielfalt der Wissensformen, WS 2018-19

Two installations at the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia 2008: “WORD RAIN: a Biotopological Reading Room” and “EMRD/Eye Movements for Reversing Destiny

DESCRIPTION of subject of study

The topology of attention is not a subjective phenomenon – showing from the outset that it will not be a phenomenology that enables us adequately to address its nature and comprehend and apply its significance or meaning, by which I mean its tendencies and potentials for actively mattering. Rather, attention’s topologizing nature, which we can understand as its vastly variable and multiple sitedness, its tempo-rhythmicity and the integrity of these in topological assemblages undergirding acts of construction or construal, is in Vilém Flusser‘s sense of the term „inter-subjective“, and in Karen Barad‘s terms, an „intra-active” occurring, process and agency of tuning between World and Person.

Attention topologies materialize as intra-active and intra-activating tuning between (at least) organism and world. Whether rocks attend to rocks we can revisit at the conclusion of this study. To World, each organism is itself a landscape of resources and affordances. Eyetracking as a tool for empirical study of literary/artistic reception, click-path and page-flow analysis in studies of digital media consumption, many visitor research techniques for the design and administration of museums, analysis of the context window problem in artificial intelligence and critical evaluation of facts and impacts of exclusion from access to educational offerings all involve ways and methods, in many cases involving technical visualizations, of materializing operative topologies of attention and revealing important processual materialities of our inherence in world.

APPLICATIONS

Permits an empirical reception aesthetics of spatial communications from visual poetry and intermedial art or environments through exhibition design to architecture to virtual environments to the complex coordinations of multi-layer hybrid communications in mixed realities.

Analysis and critique of architecture and built environment

Media critique and psychology of everyday pathologies

Deconstructive (de-ontologizing) philosophy of processuality

CONCRETE RESEARCH METHODS, PLAN, TIME

Method

The method in development draws on principles and examples from the diagramming practice Arakawa and Gins (A+G) themselves conducted, from approaches in published criticism on A+G’s work and from my own prior work and writing on the topic (above). Essentially, it involves a spatio-graphic notation scheme for mapping the body’s encounter with its surroundings in terms of “landing sites” (Arakawa and Gins 2002). Graphical schematizations of the body and its kinaesphere (sphere of bodily movement) are overlaid onto a wide-angle photo, video capture or 3D scan of the immediate architectural scene, taken at eye-level. (Examples in this early concept paper). This schematization can be marked up (notated) according to the perceptual and imaging data taken in by the observer. The resulting image allows the user to record and track attentional acts directed toward particular regions or architectural features, indexed to the body parts or body regions registering them as either affordances or impingements in ongoing acts of coordination which are recorded through verbal reporting in a comment layer on the visualization.

Applied synchronically or diachronically, such a method promises to enhance both introspective study of one’s own experience in/as architecture, and the objective/experimental observation of other users. The attentional analysis it facilitates, a methodological instantiation of landing site theory, is essential to the establishment of a beyond-phenomenological reception theory for evaluating and assessing the claims of works of experimental (and procedural) architecture.

Plan – in four not exclusively sequential phases:

1 – Groundwork and Methodology

Research and review of theoretical groundworks, art- and design-historical benchmarking, practical assessment of current tools and practices for study of attention and its use in spatial design and planning

Adaptation of attention-tracking methodologies to the integrated context of multidimensional active spaces

Development of the experiment methodology

Concept
Diagramming
Visualizing/Sensorializing
Sensoring
Recording
Reporting/Evaluation
Repeat

2 – Experiments and Data Collection

apply the methodology in prototype form to visitor experiences in selected spaces or contexts, with improvements to the methodology being integrated progressively

Parallel studies applying the same or an equivalent methodology will be carried out in other spaces. Here possibilities will be sought for the systematic use of an adaptable test space, as well as for work mirroring the experimental conditions in a parallel VR environment.

3 – Evaluation and the Design of Proposals based on Hypotheses

Results of the study in selected spaces or contexts will be fed forward into the proposal of speculative interventions conceived to optimize affective factors based on insights from the attentional analysis. In the adaptable test space and possible VR parallel, hypotheses based on initial experimentation will be materialized in speculative constructions whose use will be studied through the end of the project. The aim will be to secure test results for the targeted hypotheses, and supply material for demonstration and further articulation of the theoretical framework.

4 – A final Report and Handbook will be published presenting the theory, method and results of the project.

5 – Application for Funded Research Project

DFG ; BMBF ; …

Timeline

Okt 2024

Research Fellowship in Japan – ABTD Architectural Body Tracking and Diagramming – on-site design research and prototype development

Begin teaching WS 2024

Phase 1 – Groundwork and Methodology

Phase 2 – Experiments and Data Collection

Phase 3 – Evaluation and the Design of Proposals based on Hypotheses

Phase 4 – Final Report and Handbook publication

Finish teaching SS 2026

Finalize and Submit DFG (and/or other) Grant Proposal

Sept 2026

GOAL AND METHOD TO DISSEMINATE RESEARCH RESULTS

Published Book, Website and digital 4D Attention Tracking and Diagramming solution

MEDIUM & LONG-TERM GOALS

Forschung, Lehre, Veröffentlichungen, Habilitation, Professur, Konzept- und Design-Tätigkeit

SELECTED BIBILIOGRAPHY

Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body, University of Alabama Press, 2002

Madeline Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa, Burning Books, 1994

Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, 2007; Ch. 5. “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality”

Vilém Flusser, Mutations dans les relations humaines? De la communicologie, HD/Le Bon Voision, 2022

Bernard Stiegler, Faire attention. Vocabulaire d’Ars industrialis, en collaboration avec Ars industrialis, Flammarion, 2012

ibid. Réenchanter le monde: la valeur esprit contre le populisme industriel, Flammarion, 2006

ibid. De la misère symbolique, Flammarion, 2004/5

Warren Neidich, “From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter”, in Neidich and Hauptmann (eds.) Cognitive Architecture. From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, 010 Publishers, 2010

Warren Neidich (ed.), The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism vol. 3, Archive Books, 2014

Jonathan Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Norton, 2010

Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Prometheus Books, 2009

William James, Ch. 9 “Attention” in Principles of Psychology vol 1. Dover Books, 1950 (1890)

ibid. “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience” in Essays in Radical Empiricism, Bison Books. 1996 (1912)

ibid. Ch. 2 “The Stream of Consciousness” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life´s Ideals, Holt and Company, 1925

Raja Parasuraman (ed.), The Attentive Brain, MIT Press, 2000

Kurt Lewin, The Conceptual Representation and the Measurement of Psychological Forces, Martino Publishing, 2013 (1938)

ibid. Principles of Topological Psychology, Martino Publishing, 2015 (1936)

Friedrich Kittler, Die Wahrheit der Technischen Welt. Essays zur Genealogie der Gegenwart, Surkhamp 2014.

Edouard Glissant, Philosophie de la relation: poésie en étendue, Gallimard, 2009

Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’éspace, Éditions Anthropos, 2000

ibid. Éléments de rythmanalyse et autres essais sur les temporalités, Eterotopia, 2019

Varela, Eduardo. “The Specious Present : A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness.” In Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Eds. Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela and Bernard Pachoud. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

David Gelernter, The Muse in the Machine: Computers and Creative Thought, Fourth Estate, 1994

Bernard Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 1997

Bhikkhu Bodhi (ed.), A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, Pariyatti Editions, 2000

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances, Flammarion, 1994 (1695)

Giordano Bruno, La Disputa di Cambrai (Camoeracensis Acrotismus), Di Renzo Editore, 2008

Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009

Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire, Presses Universitaires de France, 1999 (1896)

ibid. Essai sur les donnés immediates de la conscience, Flammarion, 2013 (1889)

Gaston Bachelard, Le matérialisme rationnel, Presses Universitaires de France, 2014 (1953)