ARTISTIC ATTENTION

Katie Burkholder

In my seemingly everpresent quest to maintain autonomy over my own mind, I was excited to read “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell. What I expected was an exploration and critique of how the attention economy and the addictive algorithms that dominate it affect our minds. To my surprise, the book was more about art than it was about technology.

This came as a surprise to me because, admittedly, I didn’t do my research beforehand to know that Odell is an artist and art professor at Stanford University. But as I read her book and contemplated my own relationship with social media and the digital age, I started to recognize the role art plays in influencing our attention and, therefore, who we are.

“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience,” William James says in “The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1.” “Why? Because they have no interest to me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

Art has the capacity to train and change our attention, and therefore our experience, by altering the context through which we see the world. Odell argues that this context is a necessary component of understanding, which is why social media feels so draining— you’re overloaded with information that lacks spatial and/or temporal context. Everything happens all at once, everywhere.

“I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn’t make sense [while I’m scrolling on social media] that forecloses any possible understanding,” she writes. “Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.”

Art, on the other hand, necessitates context — the space and materials the piece is made of, the lived experience of the artist, when it was created (both within the larger scale of history and the smaller scale of the artist’s life and career), etc. — and that context naturally lends itself to an expansion of our understanding. When discussing social media algorithms that are designed to encourage healthy behaviors, Odell writes, “To me, the only habit worth ‘designing for’ is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us do.”

One such piece Odell references as enforcing this habit is “Pearblossom Highway, 11th–18th April 1986,” a collection of hundreds photographs by David Hockney all taken of the same subject, a highway scene, from different angles and on different days, as the title suggests. The photos were arranged to create a kaleidoscopic perspective on an everyday sight — and the intended impact was effective.

“Some museum goers who had seen the piece came back to tell [the docents] that afterward everything outside had looked different from what they were used to,” Odell writes. “… [T] hose who visited [the San Francisco Botanical Garden near the museum] directly afterward found that Hockney’s piece had trained them to look a certain way — a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures.”

This fragmented attention differs from the shattered inattention of social media Odell describes; the former necessitates a careful consideration of each part. A park becomes the grass, and then the bugs in the grass, and then the breeze, and then the sounds of birds, each element its own and yet dependent on the others, a simultaneous part and whole.

What I love about art, both creating and consuming it, is this slowness: meandering through a museum, lingering on that which makes your heart catch for reasons that might be unbeknownst even to you. Reading a book and underlining the lines that will fill your mind for days on end, painting everything you see in a new light. Writing only a few lines of a poem at a time, trusting the next lines will come when they come. It feels revitalizing and connective where social media feels dull and impersonal, and the older I get (and the seemingly more chaotic the world becomes), the clearer it becomes to me that that revitalization is not just a pleasure; it’s a necessity to survival.

Staff reports

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Out On Film Hosts Free Screening of Queer Comedy “Bottoms”

Out On Film will be hosted a free early screening of the hilarious queer comedy “Bottoms” on August 22.

“Bottoms” focuses on two girls, PJ (Rachel Sennott of “Shiva Baby” and “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”) and Josie (Emmy nominee Ayo Edebiri of “The Bear”), who start a fight club as a way to lose their virginities to cheerleaders. Their bizarre plan works. The fight club gains traction and soon the most popular girls in school are beating each other up in the name of self-defense. But PJ and Josie find themselves in over their heads and in need of a way out before their plan is exposed.

The screening will be at 7pm on August 22, three days before the film opens in Atlanta on August 25, at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema. You can RSVP for the event online at outonfilm.org.

Mike Pence Again Pledges to Ban Transgender Military Personnel

Thirteen Republican presidential candidates attended the Iowa GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines.

While most of the evening’s focus was the sparring between GOP frontrunner Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, stuck to his hardline conservative social policies including stating he would reinstitute a ban on military service by transgender Americans.

According to a FiveThirtyEight poll released this past week, Trump leads with 52.4 percent, over DeSantis with 15.5 percent and the rest of the current GOP field at under 10 percent in the race for the party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention scheduled to be held July 1518, 2024, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

Each candidate was slotted 10 minutes to speak at the Republican party fundraiser, after which at the 10-minute mark the microphone was to be turned off. The speaking order for the event was in order save for Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, who skipped the fundraiser as he focuses on New Hampshire:

• Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

• Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

• U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.)

• Businessman Perry Johnson

• North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum

• Former Vice President Mike Pence

• Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd

• Miami Mayor Francis Suarez

• Businessman Ryan Binkley

• Conservative talk radio host and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder

• Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy

• Former President Donald Trump

In his remarks to the more than 1,200 people in the huge ballroom the former vice president said:

“We can embrace our role as leader of the free world to confront Russian aggression and Chinese provocations with a new military fitted to the challenges in the 21st century. And we can end the political correctness at the Pentagon, including reinstituting a ban on transgender personnel in the United States military.”

Forty Percent of Transgender Adults in the US Have Attempted Suicide

A new study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law finds that 81 percent of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42 percent of trans adults have attempted it and 56 percent have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.

Using data from the U.S. Transgender Population Health Survey, researchers examined the prevalence of hazardous drinking, problematic drug use, serious psychological distress, suicidality and nonsuicidal self-injury between trans and cisgender adults. Results from this study, which is the first national probability sample of trans people in the U.S., support previously reported findings that showed significant disparities in health outcomes for trans as compared with cisgender Americans.

While trans and cisgender adults reported similar rates of hazardous drinking and problematic drug use, trans people were significantly more likely to experience poor mental health during their lifetimes. Compared to cisgender adults, trans adults were seven times more likely to contemplate death by suicide, four times more likely to attempt it, and eight times more likely to engage in non-suicidal self-injury.

Notably, trans nonbinary adults reported higher rates of harmful substance use and poor mental health than trans men and women.

“The rates of suicidal ideation and self-injury among transgender people are alarming— particularly for transgender nonbinary adults,” said study author Ilan H. Meyer, distinguished senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute. “A lack of societal recognition and acceptance of gender identities outside of the binary of cisgender man or woman and increasing politically motivated attacks on transgender individuals, increase stigma and prejudice and related exposure to minority stress, which contributes to the high rates of substance use and suicidality we see among transgender people.”