Cultivating Attention

"Cultivating Attention" Fall 2025 Lectures: 

Attending to Silence and Quietude: Finding Meaning, Loss, and the Backgroundification of Nature in the Historical Archives

Alexandra Hui focused on case studies that help people understand how individuals and communities noticed, attended to, and cared about silence over the course of the twentieth century in the US context. She argued that among several unintended consequences of putting nature sounds to work, perhaps the most consequential for how the public understood and experienced their world in the last decades of the twentieth century was the further backgroundification of the non-built environment. Examining the sensation, perception, and documentation of silence in the archive opens up categorical and ontological questions about how change is determined, challenging the very practice of history.

Cultivating Attention in the Era of AI

Carlos Montemayor spoke towards research on attention becoming relevant for discussions on artificial intelligence and political philosophy. The “automatized” understanding of our attention, as part of our general intelligence, is part of the problem that the political approach to attention is trying to criticize and challenge. In this talk, he proposed a framework to bridge two incompatible research programs, offering solutions that may ameliorate the problems associated with our contemporary attention crisis.