Attention: From Condition to Currency. Post-Screen Objects

The second installment of Estudio de Sistemas features a workshop by the collective Metahaven. This Medialab series examines complex technological infrastructures from multiple perspectives, exploring their material, social, and cultural implications.

This is a workshop for artists, designers, and filmmakers interested in the present and future of attention. Attention itself—and distraction in its many variations—seems to have evolved from a condition into a currency. 

What new tactics and strategies can be worked on to handle storytelling’s dependencies on undivided attention across media, objects, and situations? What new kinds of narrative objects will come into being in a post-screen interpretation of artists’ and alternative cinema? This workshop will be about improvised answers to such questions. No answer is final and every step welcome.  

The workshop intends to look at what some videomaking artists have colloquially described as a “collapse of attention.” The workshop is meant to point at what is, maybe, a wave of easy distraction from longer-form moving-image content in the art world. But it may also be a fundamental shift tangentially related to the crises engulfing the world today—and emergent mindsets that result from them. The Netflix CEO once said that the platform’s main competitor is sleep. If this is true, the main competitor for the long-form password protected Vimeo screener is war. 

What are we going to make? Ultra-short videos, non-screen cinema, and typologies for speculative, post-attention objects. It is a short workshop, so don’t overthink. Make this the occasion of making your first work that takes nanoseconds. Escape the crisis of the password-protected Vimeo screener.  Maybe we need to accept that our attention isn’t going to be the same again in the near future. Bring good energies. 

Sign up here

Language: English

Location: Aulario – Medialab Matadero 

Schedule 
November 7 — 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM 
November 8 — 10:00 AM to 8:00 PM 

Specific requirements 

• Laptop (with sufficient storage space)  
• Notebook / sketchbook 
• Their own making / prototyping skills