Year of
LANDSCAPE / DEMOCRACY / WELLNESS
2021 at Mildred's Lane in the age of Coronavirus Horror

The Attention Lab: The Bird’s Eye View
August 2-8, 2021

Justin Ginsberg and Anna Riley
With D. Graham Burnett / Adam Jasper / and Leonard Nalencz
Participating Fellows / Brad Fox / Jill Goldman / Billie London-Gray / Yana Payusova / Bonnie Saland / Roxanne Steinberg / Katarina Verguelis / Ruby Waldo

“Temporary metempsychosis may occur, but must not become permanent.”
-Manual of the Order of the Third Bird

Radical forms of sustained attention have transformative power. And the cultivation of our capacities for deep attention has never felt more important. The relentless commodification of human attentional resources represents a genuine threat to individual freedom, political solidarity, and the actual experience of the world around us – the phenomena of nature, the work of art and life. In this session, artists Justin Ginsberg and Anna Riley will lead a week of experiments in “practical aesthesis,” drawing on a set of formal “Birdish” practices and protocols for somatosensory activation. Committed to care, co-presence, and convivium, these durational exercises in collaborative, radical attention aim to create the conditions for a new world.

The Avis Tertia, or “Order of the Third Bird” may not even exist, though rumors of its activities abound. Its associates are said to engage in playful, insurgent, and anarchic forms of collective attention – perhaps as protest, perhaps as pure celebration of being (and/or its antithesis). Its history is the work of the research collective ESTAR(SER).