Works and practices that command and reward sustained attention, and that create communities of readers, spectators, or listeners around them, are the focus of this seminar.

In an era marked by the possibility of instantaneous "creation" afforded by AI, attention may offer a  counterpoint to the wasteful data centers underpinning these technologies. Attention keeps us within the orbit of a single work, fostering richer and more complex forms of perception, as famously illustrated by the sustained-looking exercise devised by Harvard professor Jennifer Roberts.

We further propose that extended practices of reading, listening, and contemplation are often sustained through communal forms of engagement, as attested by the enduring popularity of book clubs and other collective cultural practices. At the same time, we recognize that the time and space required for sustained attention are not equally available to all. For many minority communities, opportunities for prolonged reading, listening, or contemplation are limited by economic precarity, educational and cultural access. Yet precisely because such practices can be difficult to access, they often become powerful sites of collective belonging. Reading groups, listening circles, communal screenings, and shared acts of contemplation transform attention from a solitary privilege into a communal practice, creating networks of recognition, care, and cultural continuity through the act of overtly attending together or covertly sharing a cultural artifact. 

Despite this, and despite the obvious fact that most performances, exhibitions, and cultural events are experienced collectively, the rhetoric of criticism remains overwhelmingly focused on individual experience. In doing so, it often obscures the communal dimensions of attention that this seminar seeks to examine.

We welcome inquiries into the patience demanded by poetry and other forms of communal reading; into time-based art ; and into practices such as deep listening, which foreground senses traditionally considered "secondary" within aesthetic discourse. We are particularly, although not exclusively, interested in non-visual modes of experience: aurality, but also smell, touch, and corporality in the gallery

Possible questions include:

• How do we think and write about collective acts of attention?
• How can we move beyond the romantic and liberal "I" that continues to dominate critical discourse in order to account for communities of attention?
• How are communities of attention created and sustained in classrooms, museums, and other public spaces?
• How is attention nurtured, maintained, and renewed? How do we address the unavoidable fact that attention ultimately falters or is diverted by competing stimuli?
• What aesthetic, social, and political forms emerge from shared practices of reading, listening, contemplation, and care?

• How do non-visual and multisensory experiences reshape our understanding of attention and community?