Aesthetic Attention Laboratory: Poetic Propositions for the Decolonization of Attention

Abstract

Due to the massive coupling with digital technologies and social networks, the colonization of attention in current times has been discussed by various authors (Stiegler 2008; Crary 2014, 2023). The objective of this article is to analyze strategies developed in an aesthetic laboratory of attention, where the wager is that poetic propositions can create conditions for the displacement of the regimes of alert, vigilance, and dispersion, and for the cultivation of a joint attention open to the plane of affects. Based on the approach of the ecology of attention (Citton 2014, 2018) and inventive cognition (Kastrup 2009; Kastrup and Caliman 2023, 2025), the study proposes an expanded concept of attention, beyond the individual gesture of paying attention and the regime of focalization. It takes as its field of analysis the experience of an aesthetic laboratory of attention (LAB) held with university students gathered in regular meetings at the Institute of Psychology of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. The research conducted is based on the cartographic method (Passos, Kastrup, and Escossia 2009; Passos, Kastrup, and Tedesco 2014). The analysis relies on the use of field notes and written accounts from participants. As a result, the research indicates that aesthetic experience in a group situation is capable of displacing colonized and naturalized forms of attention, which are hegemonic in current times. Moreover, it concludes that the cultivation of joint attention produces as effects the sustaining of attention, the formation of groupality, and the experience of rest.