To Follow Things as I Encounter Them: Blogging, Art, and Attention

An article I wrote about two blogging projects by Lisa Kelly and Thea Rechner is now online, over here.

Here’s a little snippet from the introduction:

The tiny annotated moments of ephemeral experience are what I want to focus on here. Via a brief exploration of two blog projects by Australian artists, I hope to demonstrate the mutually transformative relationship between the practices of blogging and the quality of our attention.

It’s for a new online journal called 127 Prince – named after the address of the restaurant called FOOD, run by Carol Goodden, Gordon Matta-Clark and friends in 1971. My penpal, Randall Szott, is one of the editors. He invited me to contribute something to this first issue of the journal, which “will present and examine ideas on the art of social practice, and the social practice of art.”

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts about the ideas about blogging and attention that I am sloshing around over there. The journal has a comments section for discussion after each article, and the editors are keen for a dialogical process rather than using a top-down “refereed” system of selection and publishing articles.

2 thoughts on “To Follow Things as I Encounter Them: Blogging, Art, and Attention

  1. Anna Pavlova

    The excerpt from your intro reminded me of this:

    In 1932 and 1933 Sarraute composed two sketches described by some as prose poems, by others as experimental fiction. She titled these pieces Tropismes (Tropisms), and they were subsequently incorporated into her first book, which bore the same title and was published in 1939, receiving only one review.

    Tropisms

    The word tropism was taken from biology and was defined as the movement which, in response to an external stimulus, caused an organism or part of an organism to turn in a determined direction. As to her technique in applying this concept to literature, Sarraute wrote, “What I tried to do was to show certain inner ‘movements’ by which I had long been attracted… .”

    She continued,

    These movements, of which we are hardly cognizant, slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness in the form of undefinable, extremely rapid sensations. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak and the feeling we manifest, all of which we are aware of experiencing, and are able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state.

    Reply

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