Pay Attention, Stupid
By Chris Meyer
A&F Associate

Rose Hills is almost at capacity, filled with a diverse crowd of students, faculty, Claremont residents, and even visitors from other states. They stare intently at the screen in front of them, which displays a widescreen view of another crowd, this one sitting in an opera house in Manaus, Brazil. Though the Brazilian audience has been captured on film, the people on screen are no more important than those watching, nor does the behavior of those on film appear to be anything out of the ordinary. The whole experience essentially amounts to one audience watching another audience which in turn is "watching" them back; this double surveillance continues for several minutes.

Not exactly standard fare for the average Pomona College student, but absolutely appropriate given its placement within the three-day See Here: A Colloquium on Attention and the Arts, a series of lectures and performances related to, you guessed it, Attention and the Arts. Brainchild of English professors and event co-chairs Arden Reed and Paul Saint-Amour, the colloquium brought in a variety of speakers, including those versed in avant-garde forms of art, attention, or avant-garde artists themselves.

The scene above occurred during art historian Norman Bryson's talk on the works of filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, and how these works relate to attention and focus. The clip, taken from "Teatro Amazonas," was one of three Lockhart pieces shown. Another one entitled "Khalil" displayed a young boy staring directly at the camera while a type of skin blemish subtly spread across his face and to the rest of his body; the third was a clip from the hour-long "Goshogaoka," presenting a single-take shot from an unmoving camera of a Japanese middle school auditorium in which a girls' basketball team practiced a complex, lightning-fast drill for almost ten minutes. Since the films' shots are mostly static and unvarying, Bryson argues, "Lockhart sensitizes the viewer to the micro level of attention." One of the major points of all of these films was to have the viewer not only watch the film but to think about how they are watching it, especially when the "Teatro" audience and Khalil himself stare directly at the viewer, creating a reverse-voyeuristic effect Bryson termed "the Gaze."

But Lockhart is not the only artist to challenge the dominant relationships between artist and audience: another is light artist and Pomona alumnus James Turrell '65 who, in perhaps the highlight of the weekend's events, illustrated the methods and reasoning behind his interactive sculptures of light. "We have this training in which we're more occupied by the space the artist has created for us than the space in which we actually observe the art," Turrell said. The slides he showed next demonstrated how he has played with such space: his light "structures" sometimes take the form of entire rooms in which planes of light create illusory walls, while other structures are based within mock-ups of surgery rooms and telephone booths; one piece shown even involved a swimming pool through which viewers travel to emerge within another room of light. Turrell then discussed his current project: the reshaping of a dormant volcano into perhaps the world's largest work of art. A project 30 years in the making and roughly five from completion, the volcanic crater makes use of so many facets of natural light and sound that they couldn't possibly all be listed here. But the project is enormous, and the slides in general were so breathtaking and innovative that many in the audience didn't realize the lecture went an hour longer than planned.

Another new and genre-bending art form appeared at the colloquium thanks to Lev Manovich, new media artist and inventor of "Soft Cinema," a kind of multitasking video created using a Global User Interface (GUI). The GUI creates a medium which simultaneously incorporates multiple video feeds, scrolling text, a soundtrack, and various other intricacies-something akin to turning on a bunch of Windows programs and letting them all play on your monitor at the same time. This medium mirrors an aesthetic that Manovich sees prevalent in today's culture - that of palm pilots and spreadsheets; an interface rather than a dictated narrative. "Using your web browser," Manovich said, "you can now visit your favorite pornography sites, download some music, and write mail to your colleagues; it's all using the same interface." He went on to ponder how these new aesthetic principles (or "info-aesthetics," as he called them) would be relevant to all of us, as "citizens of a global information society."

While the future of art and society was being pondered by intellectuals in Rose Hills, however, many Pomona students were outside, taking part in the festivities by playing a century-old piano piece that seems avant-garde even today. "Vexations" was written by French composer Erik Satie, and its notes only occupy a single page. Satie dictated, however, that the piece must be played 840 times in a row, so performances have been relatively scarce. The first was spearheaded by sometime Pomona student John Cage in 1963, a full 70 years after its creation, and took a rotating cast of ten pianists 14 hours to complete. Last weekend 32 brave students volunteered to take a chunk of the work; as it began on Friday evening, the few observers wore smiles of disbelief, as if all thinking I can't believe we're actually doing this. But just over 24 hours later, the mood was lighter and festive, and a sizeable crowd had gathered to hear the final notes as the iteration tally advanced from 839 to 840. At the formal opening of the weekend's events, Arden Reed had promised us that "this will not be an ordinary academic gathering," and if anything proved this point it was "Vexations" and the army of students that contributed to its successful performance. But the colloquium wasn't only about challenging new media and the avant-garde; it was as much about attention as it was the arts, illustrated most lucidly in Buddhist teacher Abbe Blum's lecture on "the Quality of Attention." Blum noted that although art can address the idea of attention, attention itself can be honed to an art as well; this "art of attention" she described as "letting awareness enter each moment in a more accurate way, embracing all of our experiences." She illustrated this by having the audience close their eyes and concentrate on the repeated sound of a gong, and then that of a hammer. "Attention is cultivated by beginning to observe how we observe," Blum said. "Increasing attention does not necessarily involve narrowing, but widening awareness. Deep attention requires ease and effort; it requires feeling, not grasping."

And yet with all this talk of concentration, from time to time during the lectures I would find my attention drifting off to other concerns-to memories of the week, plans for the weekend, whatever song was last on my playlist. But I would catch myself in the act, and the whole process got me thinking about my own powers of concentration and how easily they were swayed. Hell, I would get distracted in telling myself not to be distracted. But the more we learn about our attentiveness, the easier it becomes to control it, according to Blum. Since one of the goals of the colloquium was to stimulate consideration of our own modes of thought, it triumphed in at least that respect. In fact, judging by audience sizes and the quality of guest speakers across the board, I'd say the See Here Colloquium was about as successful as one could hope, even despite general mechanical snafus and Bill Viola's being snowed in on the East coast. But he'll show up in the future, perhaps at another colloquium called See Here Again or See Over There I know it would get my attention.