Courses | Special Projects » Noticing Work
Noticing Work
“Listen. Listen. Listen. We can never be too attentive to our world.”
— Madison Smartt Bell, “Zero DB”
“Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.”
— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
“We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. . . . [W]hat a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Project
We live in what scholars and technologists call an “attention economy”—an environment in which our focus has become a valuable resource that countless apps, advertisements, and platforms compete to capture. When attention is treated as a currency, the rhythm of daily life tends toward speed: we glance rather than gaze, skim rather than read, and move on before we have fully arrived. Trained to habitually shift from one stimulus to the next, we lose the capacity for the kind of sustained and patient attention that allows us to truly observe and reflect. However, as James Williams writes, there are greater costs:
We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.
This assignment invites you to step temporarily outside the accelerated rhythm of modern life and practice slow looking—returning again and again to a single, seemingly unremarkable place and documenting what reveals itself to you there through the work of patient and persistent observation. The goal is not to reject technology or modern life, but to cultivate a complementary skill: the ability to direct your attention deliberately, to sit with what you see without rushing toward a conclusion, and to discover what emerges when you give a small corner of the world your sustained, unhurried, and contemplative gaze.
Pick some thing or some place that requires little effort to visit: a park bench; a particular tree; a single study carrel in the library; a window in a building; the inside of a public refrigerator; a single artwork at the museum; the front yard of a frat. Return to this place frequently—multiple times per week. This should not be a location you experience routinely, such as your living space; instead, you should visit some separate location, away from your everyday life. Think of this as field work.
Record your observations and date your notes with timestamps. Some of these notes may be very brief; some observations may cause you to write at more length. You might choose to additionally record what you see with photographs, audio recordings, or drawings. Your observations may lead to broader questions or curiosities that require research to resolve—follow the trail of thought where it leads.
What do you see? What do you see if you look and look and look again? What has changed since your last visit? What did you fail to notice before? What curiosity do you develop? How could you research or further investigate these things?
Inspirations
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In the 1995 film Smoke, a man takes a photo of the same street corner in NYC at the same exact time of day for over 10 years. His purpose: slow down, notice, be mindful.
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In 2012, photographer David Littschwager placed a metal frame measuring one cubic foot in various natural environments around the globe—beneath oceans, on riverbanks, in forest canopies, in NYC’s Central Park—then photographed every creature that entered the cube for a period of 24 hours. The number and variety of lifeforms captured within the “biocube” is truly incredible.
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After the 2008 US real-estate crash, Christopher Brown purchased a tiny abandoned lot in a derelict industrial section of Austin, Texas—a poisoned and forgotten parcel of land at the edge of civilization. Buried beneath the earth were the broken and rusty remains of an abandoned petroleum pipeline; above ground, the property was strewn with illegally dumped construction debris and other trash. Brown writes a book carefully exploring this tiny environmental niche, chronicling a small, stubborn ecology that clung to existence even as the world around it fell to ruin.
Illustration
Your entries might resemble the following (fictional) project:
| Baker Library Floor
The Baker Library Floor
My subject is a single square yard of the floor at the Baker library. This roughly 36" x 36" section of flooring contains 5 black tiles and 4 white tiles in an alternating checkerboard pattern. The observation area is located within the Reiss Hall portion of the library.
20251028.The torn corner of a Twix candy bar wrapper lies on the floor, just inside my subject area. The wrapper appears to be torn from the top right in a downward motion to the left, presumably to allow easier access to the Left Twix—the tastiest bar, of course. I deduce from this that the wrapper’s owner (and literer) is likely right-handed. I also observe a large black mark on the linoleum where a shoe may have scuffed the floor. The more I look at these tiles the stranger they seem—and uglier, too! I feel a little dizzy, like gazing into a vortex. Are people noticing me staring at the floor?
20251029.The candy bar wrapper is now gone, as is the black streak. I notice a line of ants walking across the southwest corner of my observation area. People are walking right over them and squashing them without even noticing! I feel a powerful urge to intervene, but I can’t interfere and remain an observer. Oh, the humanity!
20251030.I observe a single dust bunny now. It’s scuttling and twirling in the eddies of air made by passers-by . . . as if it’s dancing with me. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. The ants are no longer present. Did they spray pesticide and kill my tiny friends, or did the ants move on to another source of food?
20251104.There is a crack in the linoleum. It was difficult to see because the tile where it lies is black (I’ve numbered this tile #6 in my sketch). Was that there before? It has sand and small bits of lint and salt inside it. And also what looks like a tiny orange bead—perhaps from broken bracelet or necklace? I just realized that this is the exact same industrial black-and-white tile that was in my elementary school and in other institutional settings I’ve encountered before. Now that I’m thinking about it, this stuff seems to be everywhere in older buildings. I wonder if I can find the manufacturer of this linoleum?
20251106.Ok, I’m feeling like a complete nerd because I found the manufacturer: Forbo. The flooring in question is called Marmoleum—a linoleum that looks like marble, I guess? This stuff is ugly as hell. They have been manufacturing since 1928. Wow, here is an amazing video on the manufacturing of linoleum. I’m . . . kind of in awe? Humans are completely amazing.
20251109.I’m starting to notice that the floor gets polished on Monday evenings, and is quite lustrous on Tuesdays. I’d like to talk to the person who polishes this spot. What are they like? Who can I ask to find this person? What’s their story?