Forces of Attention
How do you want to use yours?Forces of Attention is a series of objects, inquiries, and experiments designed to help people modulate their use of the Internet to their liking. Such modulation, I have discovered, takes intention, awareness of the often invisible ideological stances of connective technologies, and outside help. Or: to use the Internet in a way that pleases rather than hinders me, I must apply attention to how and how often I’m using it.
FOA series 1, THE WORLD IS NOT IN HERE, is an artist’s book/text object designed to be displayed on or near a computer, as a reminder to look up, out, elsewhere.
Reclaiming our attention
Attention is a kind of love—and love, as they say, is hard. I was worried, a while back, about how I spend my attention online. I noticed the ease with which I slipped into my computer, and the difficulty I had in extracting myself. I complained about it. I read other people’s complaints, and people’s dismissals of those complaints.Complaining, though, doesn’t fix much. So I began scheming. I taped a narrow strip of paper to the top of my laptop, and on it I printed in magenta letters the sentence THE WORLD IS NOT IN HERE.
Every time I opened my laptop, I remembered my intentions. I did not always fulfill them, but I succeeded more often on account of the sentence. When the slip of paper wore out, I set the sentence in seventy-two-point Clarendon and printed it on a Vandercook flatbed proof press. The result is temporary also. It may require replacement with a new statement, or some other intervention, before its physical lifespan is up. But it is a start.
A new edition
The first edition of Forces of Attention no. 1 sold out long ago. But I still feel a need for it—possibly even more than when I first made it. So I've reprinted it, and have added another, smaller version of the statement for smaller devices (tablets or similar). I printed both using hand-set type at Asheville Bookworks. I've also updated and redesigned the enclosure/instruction sheet, which has been lovingly risograph printed by Woolly Press.Each copy of the edition includes one larger and one smaller iteration of the statement, letterpress printed in magenta ink on white Stonehenge paper. Both are enclosed in the instruction sheet, which is risograph printed in black and red ink. The enclosure can also serve as a display for the objects until you're ready to place them on a device—just open it and stand it up, and the objects will wave at you, reminding you to think of them.
You can affix these objects to your devices with any tape you like, but repositionable artist's tape works particularly well.
About pricing
This work was originally released via Indiegogo, and has been exhibited at End Paper Art Book Fair (2025). Now that the online preorder campaign has concluded, it is available at in-person events. To make the object more accessible, there are three levels of pricing: $10, $12, or $15.More details here.
