At Your Leisure
On attention at rest
Friends!
In the online Bible reading group I attended during the pandemic, a visiting professor of theology made an offhand comment in his lecture on Genesis that I’ve been thinking about ever since: “If the Bible has a metanarrative,” he said, “it is the movement of humanity toward divine rest.”
This is a counterintuitive reading of a famously eventful book. Still, I remember being moved by the notion that rest is the nearest one can come to godliness. My fiancée, who is from languorous Rio de Janeiro, understands this in her bones: Sundays are for horizontality. My cultural background, in contrast, is definitively WASPish, so while I find the idea attractive in theory, I find it harder to put into practice. I prefer to be in motion.
Rest is sometimes taken to mean stillness — in which case I would be failing the Genesis test. But if we think of rest more broadly, as any activity that resists the reduction of humanity to its labor power, then the aperture of rest opens onto a world of movement: of dance, of wandering, of running for the sheer thrill of speed. This restful motion (of the body, and also of the minds and senses) is the kind of stuff kids do. It is the kind of stuff adults do, too, if we are lucky.
In this issue, we turn our attention to rest. In Visions of Attention, Haena tunes into the experiments of minimalist composers Alvin Lucier and William Basinski. In Stuff for Study, Czarina shares explorations of rest on public benches and in Margaritaville. And in IRL, we highlight the events kicking off our summer semester.
Reposedly yours,
Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
Restless Loops
I am sitting in a room.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now…
Early minimalist composer Alvin Lucier really was sitting in a room when he recorded this in 1969, but the self-referentiality doesn’t end here — a tape recorder sat across from him, below a speaker that played his speech back in real time, over and over and over. At about two dozen cycles, you notice the recording start to elongate. By the end of the piece, words and syllables are stretched into unintelligible whale calls by the resonant properties of the room itself. Every room has its own resonant properties, including the one you’re sitting in. Most of the time, these properties go unnoticed. But Lucier lets them erupt into conscious attention through the simple technique of repetition.
In 2002, William Basinski looped a single melodic line across the span of an hour using a similar scenario. About thirty minutes in, certain sections have dimmed out, eventually giving way to choppy, trembling fragments. By the end, only a low hum vibrates — one that had been vibrating in the “background” (if there is such a thing in music) all along, like some kind of cosmic background radiation. This is the sound of the physical cracks on the ferrite tape that fell apart as Basinski attempted to digitize recordings he had made in the 1980s. What we hear in Basinski’s work is the deterioration of a musical phrase across the length of an album. But we also hear the death of a physical medium that had laid latent throughout the decades.
Eventually, every medium will be laid to rest. But something restless stirs in their afterlives. These two pieces by Alvin Lucier and William Basinski, released almost four decades apart, foreground the material conditions hidden in the act of recording music: Lucier with air, and Basinski with tape. This focus on the conditions of speech and music reveal that our well-ordered auditory world is simply the tip of a sonic iceberg that smoothly sinks into an amorphous sea of sound.
— Haena Chu
Stuff for Study: Rest Notes
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
The rest cure and the working body — Alicia Puglionesi for Aeon
What is time for? — Zena Hitz for Plough
The disappearance of the public bench — Gabrielle Bruney for Places
Margaritaville and the myth of American leisure — Jaya Saxena for Eater
We can learn in our sleep. Should we? — Shayla Love for The New Yorker
— Czarina Ramos
IRL
Thu, June 4th: Join us to celebrate the opening of Beyond Dark Flow: an exhibition that explores games as digital and physical spaces. RSVP HERE!
Thu, June 11th: Join us for our IRL seminar THE PARTY, where we’ll study and practice — examining parties that made history, from Studio 54 to Harlem rent parties to Enlightenment salons. Enroll HERE!
Sat, June 13th: ATTENTION LAB: SANCTUARY is a participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Sign up HERE!
Find more workshops, events, and gatherings HERE!