Drawing Time and Attention

In her debut Interintellect Workshop Salon, Julia Racsko will go beyond criticising the attention economy and set out to create an alternative by exploring our understanding of attention through drawing.

All of our lives: our perceptions, memories, emotions are mediated through our attentional capacities, yet it is often discussed in terms of productivity or time spent, like a computer’s cognitive capacity and effort. However, we can treat our mental energy with a more nurturing understanding, and build a new, matching digital media ecosystem around it. We will use a visual language based on the research of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen to note down how we attend to our daily activities, other people, or how we (don’t) keep away from distractions. This visual language provides a richer understanding of our attentional capacities than time spent. It’s also a fun drawing opportunity that fits all skill levels – it’s all lines, any pen, pencil or marker and paper will do.

By the end, we can see time and attention in a new light: not as a finite resource to manage and atomise, but as mental energy that can grow and contain depths. We will understand how the value of time should be defined by its depth and not its length – and have a tool kit that goes beyond the abstract and becomes tangible through our drawings.

In this Salon, we will explore questions like:

• How could we change our habits to better accommodate our attentional capacities instead of our calendars?
• What might change if we stop paying attention with second or minutes, and start attending and nurturing mental connections?
• How can we take a hard-to-quantify psychological concept and make it clear for our personal understanding?

Reading material:

• Giorgia Lupi: Data Humanism, The Revolution will be Visualized.
• NNG Group: Information Foraging Theory
• Beautiful Brain: The Stunning Drawings of Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal
• Flow, the secret to happiness – TED talk of Csíkszentmihályi, or even better: read the book!
• And Julia’s own research page: theory and drawings

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