Collage & Fragmented Attention

On finding order in the chaos/

I think a lot about marketing and selling. Mostly because marketing is my day job, but also because, like most artists, I aim to make work with value.

And because I think about marketing, I think a lot about attention. How to get it. How to keep it.

But also, how to prevent others from stealing mine.

"Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.”

At times, it all feels like a losing battle. There are so many things vying for my attention — some good (work and art and family) and some not great (social media and the internet and the news) — I find it hard at times to focus on any one thing for a sustained amount of time.

Maybe the real breakdown is between analog and digital. Maybe smartphone/social media addiction is real. That the habit of sitting down at a computer, or checking a phone, and staring at a screen for hours is the new smoking.

Or maybe the war marketers are waging on our attention is real. 

"Most advertisers are trying to out-distract people from their distractions and even what they actually want to be doing. Often, you’re looking to capture the attention of someone who is either searching and being presented with multiple options (like in a search campaign), or they’re not searching at all (like in display and social advertising). To make matters worse, they’re probably multitasking, too. So, how do you win against those odds?"

- from Disruptive Advertising

So maybe that's why the tactile nature of analog collage, and the process of cutting and pasting, feels like therapy to me. 

Because it gets me away from the screen and "the feed," and the anxiety-inducing effects of both.  

"Everything had broken down ... and new things had to be made out of fragments."

- Kurt Schwitters

My studio is in my unfinished basement. There's not much down there besides laundry and storage and a dehumidifier. It's just me and pile of old books and magazines, some scissors and Xacto knives and glue.

It's a place for me to exercise control over the world itself, and to brush back the overwhelming digital crush of apps and push notifications and social media rants and constant news and updates and marketing messages and images upon images upon images.

"We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and 'breaking news' about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all endlessly cycling into each other — turns us into the bland clickbait of the attention harvesters. Yet, though we justifiably consider the enslavement of bodies a terrible wrong, we willingly surrender our minds for the profit of others. This new, almost hip, kind of slavery is sought, not fought."

- from LARB review of Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants

In the end, I believe collage to be a place for me to reclaim a small part of my pre-digital brain. 

It's a place to find connections. To people, to things, to ideas.

And connections between fragments of thoughts, to weave them together into a whole that makes sense, and that provides order to the chaos of my mind.